The Time of The Cat 40
OFFUT
We continued on down the wall past the hanger door. There was a person door to the left of the main hanger entrance that the other two Pugs had been guarding. As we approached, a group of people detached themselves from the bulk of the crowd and reached the door slightly before us. They made as if to go out, but I jumped in front of them and told them to back off. One of them was the Secretary of State, and she looked greatly offended at my order.
She huffed and snapped, “Get out of our way! We’ve got to alert the Chosen Ones. You’re all going to die for killing these guards.”
The four men with her were her personal security, and the Pugs hadn’t disarmed them. Three of them had pulled their pistols and were aiming at me. I slowly raised my hands.
“Take that gun away from him!” she ordered.
One of her guards started forward, but a hand reached out of the crowd and grabbed his pistol. It was a well-trained hand, too. The owner was one of the other Marines, and he knew exactly how to disarm an opponent. The other two guards started to jump forward, but one collapsed as a Marine stepped out of the crowd behind him and expertly struck him in the side of the neck with a knife-hand blow. The other went down as the sergeant, and his other man piled on his back.
The fourth security guard was distancing himself from the Secretary with his hands raised. I motioned him over to where I was. As he started forward, I instructed the three Marines to take the Secretary back to the rear wall and hold her near the door to the transporter room.
“Don’t let her get in any trouble,” the sergeant ordered.
She cursed and struggled a bit with the three men but was quickly out of breath. She quit fighting, although if looks could kill, I’d have been dead three times over. When she started to say something else to me, I raised my palm and told her, “Stuff it!”
That got another huff and caused her to struggle a bit more, but the Marines hustled her over to the rear wall.
Liz came up holding Jefferson. He’d been staying out of the way but now was relaxing comfortably in her arms. I looked around, but couldn’t see Juan anywhere.
We gathered in a clear space near the small door to the left of the main hanger door. What developed then amounted to an intelligence briefing from the sergeant paired with a similar report from the Secretary’s security man, who turned out to have been a Navy Seal prior to his work in the secret service.
The sergeant started it off as he described being captured by a large group of Pugs who had been dressed like Afghans. He and his men had been delivering ordinance to a firebase and had simply been overwhelmed by the Pugs. After two of their compatriots had been killed with splinters, they realized the futility of fighting and gave up.
The Pugs had taken them to a village that housed a transporter. After a couple of transfers between transporters, including one where they had to walk around a building at night and into an unoccupied restroom, they arrived in some ruins that I thought must have been the Caracol.
They waited there for a couple of other groups to arrive, and then the Pugs transferred them in two large groups back through the same transporter they’d come through, only this time they ended up in this aircraft hanger.
I figured that they’d come into Carlsbad using the second transporter near the Carlsbad Visitors Center. That was the one we hadn’t had the opportunity to locate. I guessed that the Pugs had held them near the Caracol and finally brought them from Chichen Itza through to here. This duplicated our final couple of transfers and seemed to make sense.
The Pugs had provided MREs, and the people had been using a couple of restrooms that were located on the third side of the hanger, the only wall I hadn’t visited. Since many of the crowd had been here for days, they were beginning to suffer. There was no place to sit and most were unable to sleep comfortably on the concrete floor. The Pugs didn’t seem to care, though. Their primary role was to keep the humans bunched in the middle of the space. Anyone who got too close to the walls was shot immediately. The corpses were hauled out, so the air didn’t smell much worse than a locker room in a football stadium after a championship game with five overtimes.
For a fact, it was pretty rank, but we got used to it quickly.
The sergeant couldn’t quite figure out how the Pugs were able to transport from one location to another, but he had accepted the fact that they were aliens with unknown technology.
As for where we were, the building was a hangar at Offut Air Force Base just outside Omaha, Nebraska. The hanger was one of two that were involved in some secret project. He thought that the ordinary human personnel were not allowed near the two hangers and hadn’t encountered the Pugs. Those few that had ended up inside the hanger. That’s how he knew where we were. One of the captured airmen had told him.
When I asked where that man was, he explained that the Pugs would herd a group of humans through the small door that we were standing near and into a covered deuce and a half truck each night at about ten PM. The people had never come back, so he was unsure where they were going, but it couldn’t be far because the truck had lately been coming back in ten minutes to take on another load of people.
The Pugs had been bringing in more people from all over the globe right along, so the number of people in the room hadn’t varied much from day to day. The ones that went out were usually replaced by several groups ushered in through the transporter that we’d arrived through. The Secretary of State and her guards had been shoved through the door only a couple of days before.
She’d been speaking to the Pugs. They seemed to know who she was and allowed her to approach them when they came in to select people to take out. She’d apparently told them to remove the military members first and that hadn’t made her popular with the sergeant.
He finished by telling us that there were a few women in the group, and they had been carefully shielded at the center of the hanger by most of the men. There were also quite a large number of civilians from a number of different countries. I could see several different nationalities standing in smaller groups as I scanned the room.
I reasoned that the Pugs had so many transporter heads scattered all over because they were using some of them as access points to gather human captives. They didn’t want to pull in hundreds of people from one location at once. That would be a little too obvious, so spreading their hunting around was a better approach. Considering that nearly a hundred thousand people go missing in the USA annually, it was obvious that the Pugs’ strategy wouldn’t prematurely alert the human authorities as to the large volume of people they’d been capturing.
Everyone was watching us covertly as if they expected us to pull a rabbit out of our hat. It made me feel bad, because, so far, I didn’t have much of a clue as to what to do. Even a mini-lop rabbit with a switchblade and an evil disposition couldn’t help in this situation.
The secret service guard wanted to speak next, and his story was about as enlightening. He’d been a long-term member of the Secretary’s security detail, and he was very unhappy about it. He started by mentioning that she had an extreme amount of disdain for her security and held a particular animus towards military members. That explained her volunteering the military men to the Pugs.
He told us that she’d been approached by a delegation from Russia a few weeks back. The people she met were, as he recalled it, obviously Pugs. He didn’t quite know what to make of their human disguise at first and thought they were simply odd humans. Now that he knew, he was livid. He hadn’t been a party to her planning with the Pugs, but she’d dropped plenty of hints in a grandiose and smug way. She’d implied that she would soon have a more important position, and they’d better watch themselves, or she’d take some unspecified actions that they wouldn’t like.
Since she was always talking more or less in that vein, he didn’t think too much of it, but right before they were brought here, she had the Pugs drag one of her assistants out of a meeting for cautioning her about negative political ramifications of her proposed actions. The man had never come back.
According to her security guard, she’d gotten crosswise with the Pugs over a discussion about some kind of missile launch. He’d been present and had heard some of the discussion, but it had been rather vague, and he was unsure what was being planned. He did know that the launch was to be from a Russian site in the Urals, but he wasn’t sure of either the target or what kind of payload the missile was supposed to carry.
The choice of target was where the rift had occurred. The Secretary had kept insisting that they should target Beijing after the Pugs had indicated that it would be somewhere in America. The ex-seal wasn’t sure where.
The argument had increased in volume and the Pugs had finally given up and solved the problem by pulling their guns. The secret service guards had started to pull theirs in return, but like the Marines, they had given up after the Pugs had shot one of them. As he said, there was no point protecting a woman whom they all despised when it was a sure bet they’d be killed.
The ex-seal concluded by saying that he was ready to rebel due to her turning the Pugs on the military personnel. His anger over her had already convinced him to resign, but that was the last straw. Our killing the Pugs was the most positive thing he’d seen recently. He especially liked my suggestion that she “Stuff it!”
The sergeant pointed out that in about an hour it would be time for the Pugs to come and get a load of people, and we’d better be prepared for that. Usually, a small group of five came in to select the people to leave. They then ushered the humans out of the door, where they apparently got into a truck.
Just at that juncture, Juan came up, his face radiating joy and smiles. Two nice-looking, dark haired women were close behind him. I realized that he’d found his fiancee and sister.
“Well, my friend, it looks like your quest is fulfilled,” I congratulated him.
“I’m so happy! They were there in the center of the room. They have been here for the whole week they have been missing, and the chivalrous men have kept them safe for me!”
He would have continued, but the presence of the two women made me think. I turned to the sergeant and said, “We’d better begin moving people out of here as rapidly as we can. It’s likely to become even more dangerous shortly.”