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  Not Alone: Second Contact

  Craig A. Falconer

  Not Alone: Second Contact

  © 2018 Craig A. Falconer

  This edition published May 2018

  The characters and events herein are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Some of the locations found in this book are also fictional while others have been liberally adapted.

  Reader’s note: Not Alone: Second Contact was written, edited and produced in Scotland. As such, some spellings will differ from those found in the United States. Examples of British English include using colour rather than color, organise rather than organize, and centre rather than center. An exception to this rule is the use of proper nouns, which retain their American spelling where applicable.

  At the author’s request, this book has been made available free of all DRM.

  Contents

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Part 1

  WEDNESDAY

  C minus 99

  C minus 98

  C minus 97

  C minus 96

  C minus 95

  C minus 94

  C minus 93

  C minus 92

  C minus 91

  C minus 90

  C minus 89

  C minus 88

  C minus 87

  THURSDAY

  C minus 86

  C minus 85

  C minus 84

  C minus 83

  C minus 82

  C minus 81

  C minus 80

  Part 2

  C minus 79

  C minus 78

  C minus 77

  C minus 76

  C minus 75

  C minus 74

  FRIDAY

  C minus 73

  C minus 72

  C minus 71

  C minus 70

  C minus 69

  C minus 68

  C minus 67

  SATURDAY

  C minus 66

  C minus 65

  C minus 64

  C minus 63

  C minus 62

  C minus 61

  C minus 60

  C minus 59

  Part 3

  C minus 58

  C minus 57

  C minus 56

  C minus 55

  SUNDAY

  C minus 54

  C minus 53

  C minus 52

  C minus 51

  C minus 50

  C minus 49

  C minus 48

  MONDAY

  C minus 47

  C minus 46

  C minus 45

  C minus 44

  C minus 43

  C minus 42

  C minus 41

  C minus 40

  C minus 39

  TUESDAY

  C minus 38

  C minus 37

  C minus 36

  C minus 35

  C minus 34

  C minus 33

  Part 4

  C minus 32

  C minus 31

  C minus 30

  C minus 29

  C minus 28

  C minus 27

  WEDNESDAY

  C minus 26

  C minus 25

  C minus 24

  C minus 23

  C minus 22

  C minus 21

  C minus 20

  C minus 19

  C minus 18

  C minus 17

  C minus 16

  C minus 15

  C minus 14

  C minus 13

  Part 5

  C minus 12

  C minus 11

  C minus 10

  THURSDAY

  C minus 9

  C minus 8

  C minus 7

  C minus 6

  C minus 5

  C minus 4

  C minus 3

  C minus 2

  C minus 1

  Part 6

  FRIDAY

  C minus 0

  impact

  C plus 1

  C plus 2

  C plus 3

  C plus 4

  SATURDAY

  C plus 5

  C plus 6

  C plus 7

  C plus 8

  C plus 9

  SUNDAY

  C plus 10

  ONE WEEK LATER

  C plus 11

  C plus 12

  MONDAY

  C plus 13

  C plus 14

  C plus 15

  C plus 16

  C plus 17

  C plus 18

  TUESDAY

  C plus 19

  C plus 20

  C plus 21

  C plus 22

  C plus 23

  WEDNESDAY

  C plus 24

  Part 7

  C plus 25

  C plus 26

  C plus 27

  C plus 28

  C plus 29

  C plus 30

  THURSDAY

  C plus 31

  Part 8

  C plus 32

  C plus 33

  C plus 34

  C plus 35

  C plus 36

  C plus 37

  C plus 38

  C plus 39

  C plus 40

  C plus 41

  C plus 42

  C plus 43

  C plus 44

  C plus 45

  C plus 46

  THREE DAYS LATER

  C plus 47

  ONE WEEK LATER

  C plus 48

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER

  C plus 49

  C plus 50

  Author’s Notes

  Books by Craig A. Falconer

  Not Alone

  Not Alone: Second Contact

  Terradox

  The Fall of Terradox

  Terradox Reborn (August 2018)

  Terradox Beyond (September 2018)

  Funscreen

  Sycamore

  Sycamore 2

  Sycamore X

  Sycamore XL

  For all of those who believe,

  despite all of those who don’t.

  Part 1

  Kerguelen

  “Nothing weighs on us

  so heavily as a secret.”

  Jean de la Fontaine

  WEDNESDAY

  C minus 99

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  “I am hurrying,” Clark McCarthy grunted as he reached into the drinks section of the family’s new mega refrigerator. He could still hear the ads roaring from the TV, despite his father Henry’s repeated warnings that the game was about to start.

  Henry, a year clear of a life-threatening and life-changing accident, had long ago come to terms with the reality that he would never walk again. He now felt lucky to be home at all and paid more attention to his health than ever, as evidenced by the quality of the food in his easily reachable section of the refrigerator.

  Clark grabbed a packet of muffins from his own section after getting the beers. His pile of junk food wasn’t exactly a picture of perfect nutrition, but it was better than the half-eaten takeout meals and double-strength energy drinks that dominated his younger brother Dan’s section at the bottom.

  The first time Clark saw these energy drinks, he asked whether Dan realised how badly the additives could interact with his anti-anxiety pills. “I don’t need those anymore,” was all Dan had said in reply, and Clark was glad to hear it.

  Dan had seemed pretty happy and relaxed in the several months since then, with Clark’s only concern being the amount of time he was spending in his new bedroom in the recently converted basement which had no natural light and no real flow of fresh air.

  But given everything Dan had been thr
ough, and especially given the suffocating weight of the secret that had been dropped onto his unsuspecting shoulders, Clark deemed it wise to let him be and leave him to deal with everything in his own way. There was no doubt that their secret — the ultimate secret — weighed far heavier on Dan than it did on Clark or the only other person who shared the burden: their close friend and neighbour, Emma Ford.

  As well as being wired differently than Dan’s sometimes cripplingly conscientious mind, Clark and Emma’s minds also had the benefit of being kept busy, Clark with his police work and Emma with the extremely lucrative gig-by-gig PR consultancy business she conducted from her mountain-facing home office in the house next door.

  Dan, on the other hand, filled his days with whatever got him through them. He got up early every morning and kept both himself and his surroundings tidy, largely because Clark and Henry’s respective backgrounds in the military and fire service meant that they wouldn’t tolerate anything less. But in more general terms, they both went easy on him. Henry openly stated that he was happy to put up with Dan doing nothing productive with his time since his earnings over the last year had funded the major home modifications required to accommodate Henry’s new needs, and particularly since he was still bringing in excellent money through endorsements Emma had set up many months earlier.

  What Henry didn’t state openly was that he also understood that the global media attention Dan endured during Henry’s time in the hospital, made bearable only by constant support from Clark and Emma, had taken an almost unimaginable emotional and energetic toll.

  But thanks to Dan’s selfless decision to protect his father from the weight of the secret, Henry didn’t even know the half of it…

  “Just one?” Henry asked when Clark placed a single cold beer on the table in front of his own chair after placing two in front of Henry’s.

  “I think it’s time I started watching my figure,” Clark replied, dodging the real reason for his apparent lack of thirst. “It was two beers and no muffins or one beer and one muffin.”

  The truth was that Clark had an unbreakable agreement with Emma: neither would ever have more than one drink in anyone else’s company unless the other was there to keep watch. Although neither had any conscious desire to spill the secret, they both understood that the potential consequences of doing so were so great that no chances could be taken.

  “I think you’re a few years late to start watching your figure, son,” Henry quipped. “What is it they say about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?”

  Clark sat down and patted his stomach. It might have been a little bigger at 29 than it had been at 19, but at a muscular 6'4" he carried it better than most would. He then groaned impatiently when the commercials ended and the Blitz Sports studio analysts announced that the game was going to be delayed by ten minutes to allow spectators to reach their seats after a problem with the stadium’s electronic entry system.

  When the studio crew cut to a sideline reporter and the music playing in the arena began to filter quietly through the TV’s speakers, Clark’s groan gave way to a silent head-shake of disbelief.

  An all too familiar song was playing:

  “So while you’re out there in them old boots,

  running from your rags to riches;

  Spare a free thought for the dead man,

  who gave them boots their stitches.”

  Henry placed his beer down after a long gulp and turned to Clark, smiling slightly. “You know, I don’t think I’ve heard that song for thirty years.”

  “Last year, I used to hear it all the damn time,” Clark said. “Dan noticed it, too, separately from me. Some stupid old song we’d never even heard, then suddenly it’s like it was everywhere we turned.”

  “Maybe it was in a movie or an ad or something like that? Beats me. All I know is that it used to be your Uncle Pete’s favourite song.”

  Clark didn’t know what to say. No one ever talked about Pete — especially not Henry. Clark had always reckoned that every family had one thing they all quietly understood not to bring up, and Uncle Pete’s suicide had always been theirs. The look on Henry’s face after mentioning him in passing suggested that he wouldn’t welcome any follow-up questions, and Clark was only too happy to leave it there.

  Back on the TV, which the McCarthy men were now watching in awkward silence, the sideline reporter stopped talking halfway through a sentence and adjusted her barely visible earpiece.

  “Uh, folks, I’ve been asked to pass on a piece of information here…” she said, evidently waiting for the next line. “Apparently a major news incident is currently developing. Viewers can of course stay up to date on that over on our sister station, Blitz News. And, uh, as for tonight’s game, as you can see I’m now joined by…”

  Clark reached forward to pick up the remote.

  “No,” Henry said. “If it was important, they would have told us what it was. I’d bet dollars to donuts it’s just some run-of-the-mill political bullshit. Blitz News is dying on its ass now that there’s no pressing fear to keep everyone’s eyes glued to the screen, so they’re just trying to grab some of the millions of viewers who tuned in for the game and are sitting at home like us, waiting out this delay.”

  Clark put the remote down and leaned back. “Makes sense,” he said. “Sneaky bastards.”

  The fact that the reporter casually dived right into a time-filling interview with no further mention of the supposedly major news incident added further credence to Henry’s theory, because Clark knew that she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate so easily if she’d been told that something truly serious was going on.

  But just as Clark reached his arm forward again, this time for his beer, a sudden noise caught both his and Henry’s attention.

  “Claaaaark!” Dan bellowed, his voice distant and tinged with pain. Physical pain.

  Clark jumped from his chair to run towards Dan’s basement, but Dan reached the already open door before he did.

  Dan stood there grimacing, his right hand clamped to the back of his neck.

  “It’s okay, man,” Clark said, helping him to the couch. “Did you have a weird dream?”

  Dan shook his head weakly.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Henry asked. “Dan? Are you alright, son?”

  As Dan’s grimace began to fade and he slowly lifted his hand from the easing pain at the back of his neck, he ignored the questions that hadn’t even registered and asked Clark one of his own: “Where’s Emma?”

  “I dunno, man. Why do you need her?”

  “Clark…” Dan said, widening his tear-stained eyes and lowering his voice to a whisper so that Henry wouldn’t hear. “I think they’re coming back.”

  C minus 98

  Port-aux-Francais Research Station

  La Grande Terre, Kerguelen Islands

  Over 2,000 miles from the nearest civilian population base, Billy Kendrick and the tourists under his watch sat in a quiet dining hall awaiting the arrival of their main breakfast course. The local delicacy of scurvy-busting Kerguelen cabbage had gone down well in a warming soup, with Billy’s excited tourists listening to his expertly delivered stories and theories as they ate.

  Billy, a once-respected archaeologist who had long ago turned his back on an academic world he deemed guilty of “rejecting reality for simplicity’s sake”, became well known to the public as a self-styled disclosure activist during a decade spent trying to expose what he saw as the greatest cover-up of all time: the cover-up pertaining to government knowledge of intelligent extraterrestrial life.