THE CONSPIRACY WALL
A Sentinel Trilogy Story
By Brian Bullock
A Starborne Studios Production
Derek measured the wall before he took anything off it.
Eleven feet four inches, corner to corner. He wrote it in the notebook, set the notebook on the arm of the couch and got the stepladder out of the hall closet.
The framed print of the Bitterroots came down first. Then the two watercolors Rebecca had picked out at a fair in Hamilton, and the mirror, and a shelf with nothing on it but a candle. He carried them into the bedroom one at a time and stood them against the wall behind the door.
Nine nail holes and a pale rectangle on the paint where the print had hung.
He got the spackle out from under the sink and had two of the holes filled before he stopped. He was going to be making many more holes so there was no point in filling them.
The last one down was a photograph of the three of them outside the field house the day he graduated. Derek on one end in the gown, Barbara in the middle, Bron on the other end in a borrowed shirt, squinting. He took it as far as the bedroom door, then turned around and hung it back up, low, in the corner, where nothing else was going.
He had four hundred index cards in three colors, a spool of red string, and a box of pushpins on the kitchen counter. He had one fact to put on the wall.
He wrote on a blue card: TRUCK. SERVICE ROAD TWELVE. KEYS IN IT. He pinned it at eye level in the middle of the wall and stepped back to see how much of the wall one card covered. It’s not much he said to himself, but it’s a start.
The county impound lot sat behind the fairgrounds in Choteau, gravel, chain-link, and a single-wide with a window unit hanging out the side. The man who ran it came out before Derek had his truck door shut.
"Can I help you."
"Gray Colorado, Montana plates. Came off Service Road Twelve."
"Back row." He did not look at the lot. He looked at Derek. "You're the brother."
"Derek Matthews."
"Ray Coburn." He did not put his hand out to shake it. "I can't let you past the gate."
Derek looked past him. The truck sat thirty feet away in the last row, nosed out, a strip of white plastic across the seam of the driver's door.
"I'm not asking to drive it. I want to look in the cab."
"I know what you're asking."
"It's my brother's truck."
"I know whose it is, son." Coburn put his hands in his jacket pockets. "There's a hold on it I didn't put there and can't take off. I called the number on the paperwork Tuesday and asked for an exception on account of the family. Man on the other end took my name and my badge number and told me the request was noted."
"Noted."
"That's the word he used."
"Who do I talk to."
"I don't know."
"There's a name and number on the paperwork."
"That's all there is. Nineteen years of running this lot, and I have never once had paperwork come through with nothing on it but a phone number."
A magpie came down on the hood of the truck, walked the length of it, then flew off the tailgate.
"Was it sealed when it came in," Derek said.
"It came in on a flatbed with the seal already on it. Wasn't mine and it wasn't the sheriff's."
"Is the seal numbered."
Coburn looked at him a second. Then he went out into the lot by himself, down the back row, and bent over next to the driver's door and pulled his glasses down from his forehead to read the numbers. He came back and read the number off the palm of his hand. Derek wrote it in the notebook and read it back to him twice before Coburn said that was it.
"I'm sorry about your brother," Coburn said.
Derek put the notebook in his jacket. "What time do you open."
"Seven."
"I might come back."
"You can stand at that fence any day you want," Coburn said. "That’s the one thing I can let you have."
The sheriff's office was on Main Street, four blocks up.
She knew it was him even before he gave up his name.
"You were at Service Road Twelve," she said. "In the dark."
"You told me to come in the morning. So here I am. A man at your front desk told me the case had been transferred."
"That's right."
"You told me that at eleven o'clock at night."
"I did."
"It was already gone before I got here."
"It was gone before I got here too," Calloway said.
He sat down in the chair across from her. She had not offered it.
"What did you find out there," he said. "And who are the people who took it."
"The case has been transferred out of this office. The people who took it don't answer to me." She held his eyes. "I'm sorry. That is what I have."
"You investigated the scene."
"I did."
"You were the first one there."
"The ranger was first. I was second."
"There was a line of dead brush running off the road into the trees. I could see it from where you had stopped me."
She did not answer.
"How long between the call coming in and those people getting there."
"Why."
"Because I want to know how fast."
Calloway put her pen down. "He called it in a little before five in the afternoon. They came up that road at first light."
"That's twelve hours."
"About that."
"From where?"
She did not answer that one either.
He wrote his number on the back of an old work card and set it on the desk then stood up. She read it and put it in her top drawer.
"I'm going to keep asking," he said.
"I suspected as much."
He got back to Missoula after dark and had four more cards on the wall before he took his coat off.
Blue was for what was confirmed. The seal on the driver's door, numbered, not the county's and not the sheriffs. The case out of Teton County in under a day. Twelve hours between a ranger's radio call and men coming up a forest service road at first light. Green was for what he had no answer to. He wrote FROM WHERE, on a green card and pinned it on the board.
Then he stood there and figured out what the twelve hours had to mean.
He had spent ten years moving freight, and moving freight teaches a man what it costs to put people and equipment on a road. Twelve hours is not enough time for somebody to hear about a problem in the middle of the Rocky Mountain Front, decide the problem matters, find the people who ought to look at it, brief them, get them into vehicles, then drive those vehicles up a forest service road that most of the state has never heard of. Twelve hours is barely enough to move people who already have their bags packed and who are already close enough to make the drive. Whoever came up Service Road Twelve at first light had been waiting somewhere within a half day's drive of that clearing. They had been waiting there before the ranger ever keyed his radio.
He wrote WAITING FOR WHAT, on a second green card and put it beside the first.
The phone rang at nine. His mother.
"Did you get down there."
"I did."
"And?"
"They wouldn't let me inside the fence. I stood thirty feet from his truck for twenty minutes and then I drove up and sat in the sheriff's office, and she told me she was sorry." He looked at the wall. "That is all I have. I'm not going to sugar coat it for you."
Barbara was quiet.
"What are you doing up there, Derek."
"I took the pictures down off the living room wall. Everything I get from here on goes on that wall, and none of it gets removed until I know where he is."
"All of it."
"Yes, all of it."
"You're going to keep me informed," she said.
"When I have any tangible information, I will call you and let you know," he said.
After they hung up, he stood in front of the wall. Six cards on eleven feet four inches of wall, nine open nail holes, and a photograph low in the corner. Then he opened the notebook to a clean page, wrote the date at the top, and started the list of what he did not have.
He drove back to Teton County the following weekend. The access road had been closed, orange and white barriers with ROAD MAINTENANCE stenciled across them. He parked two miles out and went in on foot through the timber, off coordinates he'd pulled from a public geological survey.
The brush line came in from the road, dead and gray for a hundred yards, then it quit. He stood where it quit and waited to understand what he was looking at. Needles and leaf litter and flat forest floor, the same on every side of him as it was under his boots. Whatever killed that brush killed it up to here and no further. He walked the whole clearing twice. The first pass gave him nothing but forest. On the second pass the needles stopped him. They were lying wrong along a line about thirty feet across, every one of them pointed in the same direction.
He crouched and worked his fingers down into the Soil and turned the dirt over, a handful at a time, moving along the line. Six inches down his fingers closed on an edge.
A curved piece of metal no bigger than a silver dollar. He almost missed it. He reached out and got a stick off the ground, worked the point of it under the edge, levered the piece up out of the dirt, and held it in the light.
It caught the afternoon light. Not dirty, not damaged. Shiny, multicolored like looking on the inside of an abalone shell that was wet.
One edge was not smooth. It ran ragged and bright, where a piece looked like it had broken off it.
He put the piece in a zip-lock bag out of his jacket pocket. The bag was left over from a sandwich he had made himself for the drive up. Then he got down on his hands and knees and went over that ground again. He found a second piece eleven feet away, under a branch, pressed down flat into the dirt with the top of it barely showing.
Derek walked the forest ground one more time, then went back and got in the cab. He sat there with the second one in his palm, turning it over, rubbing the dirt off it with the cuff of his shirt.
Then he took the first one out of the bag and set them side by side on his knee. Both had the same ragged edge. He turned one of them around until the two ragged edges faced each other and pushed them together, they went together and held, the curve running straight through from one into the other. One piece, broken in two.
Derek put both pieces into the sandwich bag and put them into his pocket. He started his truck and left the area. On his way back to Great Falls, he stopped at a hardware store and bought a fireproof box, he paid cash for it.
At his desk that night he put one half in the box and left the other half under the lamp. It was warmer than the room and warmer than his hand, when he held it still there was a slight vibration in his fingertips. He hadn’t noticed earlier.
The half in the box stayed in the box. The half under the lamp was the one he would carry into offices and put in other people's hands, on the off chance he never got that piece back. He would still own half of what he had dug out of the ground where his brother's truck was found.
The rest of that month went into finding out what the fragment was made of.
Derek took the first piece to a physicist at the University of Montana, a man he'd met at a conference the year before and remembered because he had spent an entire panel refusing to say anything he could not support. That was why Derek picked him.
He ran it on an X-ray fluorescence unit first. While it worked, he told Derek what it was doing, which was firing X-rays at the fragment and reading the energy that came back off it. Every element on that table gave back its own fixed set of readings. Iron, lead, and a hundred and sixteen others, and every one of them has its own place on the graph.
The professor read the screen, said nothing, and ran it again.
Then he got up, went to the other side of the room and opened a drawer and took something out of it. He came back with a small disc of pure copper, then placed it in the machine and ran that. Copper reading came back as copper just like he had expected. He set the disc aside and ran the fragment a third time.
The professor had been holding a pen and turning it end over end while the machine worked. At some point the pen stopped turning. He put the end of it in his mouth and bit down on it and left it there while he kept his eyes on the screen.
"Say what you're seeing," Derek said.
"I'm seeing lines where there aren't supposed to be lines." He did not look up. "The peaks are clean. That's the part I don't like. A bad sample gives you noise, and contamination gives you a mess you can pick apart. This is not a mess. This is a strong, clean signal sitting at an energy that does not belong to anything I know of."
"Meaning what."
"Meaning the machine is broken." He said it fast. "Or the sample is coated in something I can't account for. Or the calibration drifted between this morning and now."
"You just ran a copper disc."
The professor sat back, and for a while he did not say anything.
"Do you know what happens to me if I write down that I found something that isn't on the periodic table. Not what happens to the work. What happens to me. I have graduate students. I have two grants that get reviewed in the spring." He pushed the fragment back across the desk with one finger. "Whatever this is, it is not going to be found by me."
"You think it's real."
"I think you should take it somewhere else." He looked at Derek straight on then, for the first time since the third scan. "And I think you should be careful who you take it to."
The second lab kept the fragment for four days. When Derek called on the fifth, the woman who had checked it in put him through to a man who did not give his name or his title. He did not say hello. He said they had run the sample, and that they had also run it against their own records of every synthetic composite in their catalog. Then he asked Derek where he had got it, making it clear he was not answering any of Derek's questions until Derek answered his.
Derek told him about a forest service road in Teton County. Loose dirt, about six inches down, off the shoulder.
The man said that in nine years he had been handed several samples that came back looking like this one, and that every one of them had been salted, meaning somebody built the thing on purpose and buried it where it would be found. He said it with no anger in his voice. He had decided who Derek was and was telling him so before he hung up.
The fragment came back in the mail four days later in a padded envelope, with nothing written on anything inside it.
The third lab kept it twelve hours.
The call came at ten at night from a number Derek did not recognize. The man on the other end was reading. It sounded just like a telemarketer working off a script. He said their equipment had experienced multiple unexplained failures during testing. The sample was being returned by courier. They would appreciate it if he did not contact them again.
Derek asked what kind of failures.
The man said he could not go into that.
Derek asked which piece of equipment.
The man said he could not go into that either, thanked him, and got off the phone.
Three labs. Three non-answers. The first had called it impossible. The second had called it a hoax. The third had called it a malfunction on their end. That was the only one of the three that put the trouble on their side of the table instead of his.
The third lab had kept the loose half for twelve hours and he had spent those twelve hours understanding what it would mean to drive home without it. There was a van on his street that changed drivers every eight hours. His apartment had a door; a man could get through in under a minute.
He drove to his mother on a Sunday and left it with her.
"What is it," she said.
"I don't know. I found it out where they found his truck." He put it in her hand and closed her fingers on it so she would feel the warmth of it. "Keep it somewhere nobody would look. Don't tell anybody you have it, including me on the phone."
She turned it over once and looked at him. She did not ask him anything else. She put it in the pocket of her robe.
He went back to Choteau twice that fall. The first time Coburn came out and stood at the gate with him and neither of them said much for twenty minutes.
The second time the back row was empty.
"Went out Tuesday night," Coburn said. "Flatbed, same as it came in. Two men, and neither one of them had ever been here before."
"Who signed for it."
"Nobody signed anything. There was no paper on it going out." Coburn worked his jaw once. "There was no paper on it coming in either, and I have spent two months telling myself that somebody was being sloppy."
Derek stood at the fence and looked at the gravel where it had been.
"I would have called you," Coburn said. "I never had a number."
Derek took out the notebook, wrote his number in the corner of a page, tore the corner off and pushed it through the chain-link. Coburn folded it into his shirt pocket without reading it.
Back at the apartment, he wrote each of the three lab answers on its own card, pinned them in a row above the fragment, and ran a length of red string from the first to the last.
The wall took up most of the living room by the third month. Maps of Teton County, annotated in red pen. Satellite imagery printed at three different resolutions. The photographs he had taken from the road the night they found the truck, none of which showed anything but timber and the moving edge of a work light. A timeline running along the top. Everything went on index cards first; Blue confirmed facts, red inferences, green questions he didn't have answers to yet. The wall was mostly red and green.
Rebecca had asked him about it on her first visit after it went up. She stood in the doorway of the living room and looked at it for a long time without saying anything.
"It looks like something a person in a movie has," she said finally. "Right before they figure out, they're the bad guy."
"It's organized," Derek said.
"Derek." She looked at him. "How long has it been since you slept more than four hours?"
He didn't answer.
The call came in on a Thursday at a quarter past six in the evening, while he was standing at the counter eating out of a can.
The number was a four zero six prefix he did not know. He answered on the first ring. He answered every call on the first ring, because any one of them could be Bron, and he was not going to let one go to voicemail on the chance it was.
"Is this Derek Matthews."
A woman's voice. Not young. Careful with what she wanted to say and talking slightly too slow.
"This is."
"My name doesn't matter. I work on a radar screen. To be more accurate I watch a radar screen. I have access to recorded takes." A pause. "There's a return I want to tell you about."
Derek put the can down.
"Go ahead."
"It comes up from the ground. It holds a few seconds, makes one turn, then it goes straight up and off the top of my screen. The whole thing is under five seconds."
"Were."
"Teton County. Close enough to a truck they found, that I stopped calling it a coincidence.” She told them about some other small details that might or might not have been important but wanted to make sure he had everything she knew.
"Say that part again."
"What part," she said.
"All of it," Derek replied.
She said it again. The second time through, Derek was writing all of it down, making sure not to miss any detail.
"How do you know it's not your equipment."
"Because I know what my equipment does, how it works and if it’s acting up.”
The line went quiet long enough so Derek checked the phone screen to see if the call had dropped.
"Eleven years I've been doing this," she said. "I shouldn't be on this phone."
The line went dead.
Derek called the number back several times over the next two hours. It rang out every time, and by the following morning it did not ring at all.
What he had was four sentences that held.
Something had gone up out of those woods. It went straight up at a high speed.
He stopped on that one thought first. She never told him how fast, then she was off the phone before he thought to ask her, so what he had in place of speed was that she caught it on her screen. Under five seconds from the first return to the top of her screen, with one turn. He said the five seconds out loud, followed by, "That was fast, very fast." Then there was the brush, a hundred yards dead and gray running off the road into the timber, nothing burned about any of it, no strange smell coming from the dirt that might explain the brush around him and how it got that way.
"Is that what killed the brush," he said to the empty room. "Something flying up off the ground like that."
Secondly, a system that watched the whole sky over this country saw something moving in it and called it an error.
He crossed to the table, pulled a green card off the stack, and wrote HOW MANY on it in block letters. They had been watching that sky for longer than he had been alive. She said she had eleven years on her screen and one return she could not understand. He thought about all the other ones that got the word error attached to them and then got filed away.
Third, Bron's truck had been sitting on the shoulder of Service Road Twelve when whatever it was, left the ground.
He looked at the first card he ever put on that wall, blue, eye level. TRUCK. SERVICE ROAD TWELVE. KEYS IN IT.
"You pulled over on your own, didn't you Bron," he said. "Nobody made you pull over out there. You went there for a reason. What would have made you go out there. What was so important."
After that he had nothing. He said the rest of it out loud anyway, one piece at a time, to hear how each one sounded. Did his brother go up in that thing. Was he taken against his will, leaving with the truck door left hanging open behind him. Did he walk in on the middle of something he was never supposed to see.
He wrote in his notebook, in block letters: BRON IS SOMEWHERE.
He took two blue cards off the stack and put the truck and the ascent up where the timeline ran, then stood back far enough to take in the whole wall. Two more pieces of blue in among the maps, the imagery, the three lab answers on their string, and the months of red and green he had been living in since October.
He lost his job the following month. He had been doing enough to keep his work moving and no more, while the wall got the rest of his attention. At some point enough, stopped being good enough.
His manager called on a Wednesday afternoon. Derek was up on the stepladder with a pushpin held in his teeth.
"Derek. You got a minute."
"Go ahead."
His manager talked for a while. He had a list of things he had to say. Derek stood on the ladder and let him get to the end of it. When he was done Derek took the pushpin out of his teeth and held it in his fingers.
"I understand," Derek said. "Thanks for calling me yourself."
His manager started in on something else. Derek interrupted, thanked him again and hung up. He directed his attention back to the wall and placed the pin on it he had been holding.
The severance was not as large as he had hoped. Unemployment did not start until a month after the job ended, and when the payments did start, they came to about half of what he had been making. He sat down at the table one night with the checkbook open and added the savings to that, everything he had put away since he first started earning and worked out how far the money went. Rent was the largest thing he had to deal with. The savings would carry him a good while, on top of what came in every month, but every month he would be taking money out of that account and putting nothing back in, and there was a number at the bottom of it that he would reach eventually.
He moved out of the Missoula apartment when the lease came up and rented a cabin in rural Montana. Paid three months in cash, gave no forwarding address, told no one where it was, except his mother. He loaded the wall into flat boxes, each section labeled and numbered and rebuilt it in the cabin's bigger living room in a day and a half.
Rebecca drove out to the cabin a few weeks after he moved into it.
She knocked. Derek opened the door and stood there looking at her.
"Rebecca. How did you find me."
"I called your mother. She gave me your address."
She came up the step and put a hand on his arm and kissed him on the cheek.
Then she stepped in and stopped where the room opened. She had not seen the wall since the apartment, where it had taken up one wall of the living room. In the cabin it ran the whole length of the living room.
"It's gotten bigger."
"It has."
She walked along it, not too close, reading the cards, following the string and where it went to. She stood at the center briefly, backed up so she could see the whole wall, then continue to the other end. She then turned, walked back to Derek and looked at him.
"You don't sleep," she said. "You don't eat. Look at the weight you've lost. You are spending every waking hour on this."
"How do you know that," he said. "How do you know any of it."
"Did you forget I talked to your mother. She told me what is going on with you. She is worried about you, Derek, and she has nobody else she can talk to."
"He's alive. I know he's alive."
"Then let someone else find him."
"No one else is looking. The case was transferred and classified, and the people who classified it are not looking for Bron. They're looking for whatever he found. There's a difference. To them that is more important than a missing person."
She stood in the doorway with her bag and looked at the wall again, months of work in colored string and index cards and photographs.
"I love you," she said. " I didn’t leave you because I stopped. I'm leaving because I can't watch you do this anymore, and I can't make you stop, and I've used up everything I had, trying to figure out a third option."
She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek again and told him, "I just wanted to see how you were, and maybe find that you are back to your normal self. I hoped for too much. Goodbye, Derek."
She left. He stood at the wall for a while. Then he sat down and opened his notebook and went back to work.
Two days after that, he went into the bedroom and dug the two watercolors out of the stack he had never unpacked. She had picked them out herself at the fair in Hamilton and had carried them around the rest of that afternoon rather than leave them in the truck. He carried them out and laid them face down in the bed, one on top of the other, and put a tarp over them. He would drive them down to her when he was next in town, and he would leave them on the step if she did not want to open the door.
He was in town twice that winter and did not take them either time.
They were still under that tarp in the spring.
His mother called every Sunday. He always answered.
"Did you eat today?"
"Yes, Mom."
"Real food?"
"Pizza is real food."
She was quiet for a moment. "Do you have anything."
Derek looked at the wall. At the timeline, the photographs, the card with the four sentences on it.
"Nothing I can put in front of you."
"You said you'd call when you had something tangible."
"I know what I said. Nothing has changed since last Sunday."
"Okay," she said quietly. "I just worry."
"I know, Mom. Me too."
He held one thing back from her for a year. She knew about the wall because he told her about it. He also gave her the fragment that she kept in her robe pocket. What she did not have was the woman on the phone and what the woman had watched go up off the ground, because the moment he gave that to her she would ask him what it means, and every answer he had ended with his brother going up in something and not coming down. He was not going to put that in his mother's mind to worry about on top of everything else. When he had all the information, she would get all of it. Until then, as far as Derek was concerned, pizza is real food and there was nothing tangible to report.
A year working on the wall had not moved him one foot closer to where his brother was. He knew about the truck on the shoulder, the dead brush in the woods, the two fragments, the one he kept and the one he gave his mother, the fast-moving object on a radar screen that she could not identify, attached to a word that said error and filed away. What all of that meant, what all of that was worth, only meant something to Derek, which was nothing. His clues had gotten him more questions than answers. He was going to keep going anyway. There was no version of this story where he would stop looking for his brother.
The call came at two forty-seven in the morning.
He was awake. He was usually awake early in the morning. The cabin was quiet, and outside it was Montana dark. That is what they called it. Really dark, no lights from anywhere, far enough out where it is quiet enough that a small sound carried a long way.
His phone lit up on the desk beside him. The number looks strange, too many digits, wrong country code. He can't imagine how it was able to connect with his cell. He stared at it for a moment, then picked it up. "Hello?"
A hiss of interference. Then it cleared.
"Derek?"
He knocked the chair back jumping to his feet. "Bron. BRON."
"Yeah." His brother's voice, thin and stretched, with a strange hum in it. "It's me. I'm okay. Derek, I don't have much time. I need you to listen."
"Where are you. What happened. Mom has been out of her mind, we all have, Jesus, Bron."
"I know. I know, and I'm sorry, but." Static cut through the line, a burst of it, and then cleared. "There's a safe deposit box. First National, Helena. Box eleven forty-seven. The key is in my old room, taped inside the heating vent by the window. Get it. Look at what's inside. Then."
More static. Longer this time.
"Trust what you find. Even if it seems impossible."
"Bron. Where are you?"
A pause. The line breathed with interference.
"Look up," Bron said. Very quiet. Then the line went dead.
Derek stood in the silence of the cabin with the phone against his ear and the wall behind him with a year of his life on it. He did not move.
The call had lasted forty-three seconds. Forty-three seconds of his brother's voice after a year of silence.
Look up.
He went to the window.
The moon was full. Big Montana moon. It lit the fields silver and threw shadows sharp as cut paper. He'd looked at it his whole life, from his mother's backyard and from dorm windows and from the porch of Bron's apartment in Missoula, without once stopping to look at it.
He looked at the moon now. His first thought was how clear the moon was, the craters standing out on the surface, the dark running all the way around the outside. Then it hit him, like a two by four. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and only one word came out of his mouth.
"No!"
He was trying to find the place where the clues broke, and why nothing was adding up. Everything added more questions than answers. The wall got bigger, not smaller, but the clues didn't break. He was just missing the most vital piece, the one that was right there in front of him on the porch of the cabin, at his mother’s house, at his apartment. Everything fit, every piece of data he had, all of them at once came into focus and pointed at one thing. He had given up his job and his apartment and Rebecca and most of the year following evidence. It had been pointing at him every day for the past year. Now he was standing at a window in a Montana cabin early in the morning with his brother's voice still ringing in his ears, looking outside at a big bright moon that filled the field with light.
He grabbed his keys and the notebook and his coat off the hook. Then he was out on the steps in the cold, rushing to the truck, putting his coat on before the door shut behind him.
His mother's house had the kitchen light on when he pulled in. She was up. She was always up by six. She opened the door with a dish towel over her shoulder and her glasses pushed into her hair.
"Derek. It's barely light out." She looked at his face. She could tell something was up.
"What's wrong."
"Nothing. Couldn't sleep." That part was true. "Wanted to see you."
She headed to the kitchen to put the coffee on. He followed her there, then stood in the kitchen he grew up in, watching her and let her fuss over him, the mug, the milk, a plate of toast he did not ask for but took anyway. She talked while it brewed, the tomatoes and the new people that were down the road. He said uh-huh in the right place and nodded and smiled when she looked over.
He had driven the whole way to his mothers with the words ready. Bron called in the night, alive, forty-three seconds of his voice on the phone, telling him to look up. Then he was standing in that kitchen with the coffee going and his mother talking about the new people down the road. What he had to give her was a bad connection in the dark and a conclusion she would have to take on faith, with the key still taped inside a vent twenty feet down the hall. She had asked him for something tangible every Sunday for a year. He was not going to hand her the moon across her own table and then walk out her door. He was close to finding out the truth, and he would wait just a little longer to tell her.
"Gonna grab something out of his room," he said.
She did not think anything of it. He went down the hall and pushed open the door to Bron's old room. Bed made. The Montana State pennant was still over the desk where she left it. He knelt at the heating vent under the window and worked the cover off with his thumbnail. The key was taped inside the duct, where Bron said it would be. Small, brass, a number cut into the bow. He freed it, set the cover back, and put it in his pocket. Down the hall she was humming, the same tune he had heard his whole life.
Two mugs were on the table when he came back out.
He grabbed one of the mugs off the table and leaned on the kitchen door sipping on his coffee. His mother was still talking about things going on in the neighborhood, Derek’s still nodding in the right place, though his mind was somewhere else.
He drank half of his coffee standing up.
"I've gotta go, Ma."
"You just got here. Go where?"
"Just have to take care of something." He set the mug down and looked at her. The towel, the glasses in her hair, the whole warm kitchen. She looked back, puzzled, a little pleased, none the wiser. "I love you. You know that, right?"
"I love you too, honey. You're scaring me a little."
"Don't be." He kissed the top of her head. "I'll see you later. I promise."
He was on the road to Helena before the sun cleared the trees.
First National opened at nine. He was in the lot by six-forty-three with a coffee from the nearby gas station, watching the bank doors. When nine o'clock finally rolled around, his coffee was gone and the caffeine was kicking in, that’s when he noticed the woman opening the bank front door. He got out of the truck and headed towards the bank.
The woman who walked him back to the boxes checked his license against the names on the account. Derek saw his own name on the card when she turned it, added to Bron's box on a date he did not understand, somewhere during the middle of all of this. He did not say anything. She left him alone in the room with the box.
Box eleven forty-seven held two things. A folded letter, and a band of silver metal, round and seamless. He turned it over a few times looking at it and then set it aside.
He read the letter first.
Derek. If you're reading this, then I made the call. You found the key. You found the box. You found this.
I know I gave you nothing and went quiet, and I would bet everything I have that you never let it go, because you're the only person stubborn enough to keep believing there's an answer. You were right. I couldn't tell you sooner. There was no way to say it that wouldn't have sounded like I'd lost my mind, and I needed you steady, not committed somewhere.
So do this exactly. Take the band out of the box and keep it on you. It's safe. Then get somewhere nobody can see you. Your car's fine. Anywhere quiet, alone, no cameras, no neighbors. Then wait. It does the rest.
Someone is going to want to talk to you. Listen to her. She's the reason I'm alive, and she already knows more about you than you'd be comfortable with, because I talk about you too much. Do what she says. Go where she sends you.
And Mom. I never told her what was going on with me. I hardly called, and when she asked if something was wrong, I told her no, everything was fine, and I let her fill in the blanks herself. I should have been up front with her. I was carrying something I did not want to burden her with, so I did not tell her anything, and I told myself that was the decent thing to do. That's the part I hate. I'm going to give her all of it, in person, in her kitchen, not over a bad line. Help me hold that a little longer.
You always told me I was worth something. I never believed you. Come find out if you were right.
Bron.
He read it twice. Then he closed his hand around the band.
He left the bank and went to his truck. He took the far corner of the lot with nobody around. He sat with the band in his open hand, and nothing happened for a long while.
He turned the band over in his fingers and held it up against his hand. Too small. The opening was not going to clear his hand, and he knew that before he started, but he decided to give it a try anyway, because the letter said keep it on you and there was nothing else to do.
He worked the edge down over his fingers and the metal gave. It opened wider as he slid it on his hand. Not stretching so much, as expanding on its own. When the band settled against his wrist it shrank back up, snug all the way around, like he just put on a rubberband.
He sat there in the front seat with his arm out in front of him, turning his wrist over, looking at it.
"Okay," he said. "That's new."
The air above his wrist folded into a beam of light, and a woman stood in it, not quite solid.
"Derek." Her voice came out of the band on his wrist. "Nice to meet you," she said. "Bron sent me to bring you in."
He looked at her for a long moment. The only thing he could get out was, "Who are you."
"My name is Elaina," she answered. "I work with Bron."
"Is he okay?"
"He's safe. He's waiting for you." A pause. "Go back to your cabin and be ready by sundown. I’ll come to you."
He nodded.
"Are you ready to find out what has been going on, and where your brother went?"
He thought about the wall, the forest where his truck was found, the sheriff in Teton County, the labs that turned him away, Rebecca in the doorway with her bag, his brother's voice on a bad line.
"Yes," he said. "God, yes."
The light folded away. He started the car and drove back toward the cabin.
He waited on the cabin porch. He did not wait long.
The sun was down behind the ridge and the sky over the tree line had gone orange when it came in over the trees. He could not tell what it was at first. Only that it was dark against the color, and that it made no sound at all. It came down slowly and steadily and settled in the yard behind the cabin. The orange light reflected off the sky ran along the top of the craft. There was no reflection coming back. It was almost as if the hull absorbed the light.
Derek stood up. He left the notebook on the chair and walked out to meet it.
THE END
The Conspiracy Wall is a story from the Sentinel Universe by Brian Bullock, a Starborne Studios production.
If this was something you enjoyed, there is a lot more waiting. You can find the rest of the Sentinel Universe stories, the novels, and whatever I am working on next at brianbullockwriter.com. That is where the reading lives, along with the books and the latest on what is coming. Come find the rest of the universe and thank you for listening.