Dulce Base (The Dulce Files Book 1) Read online

  DULCE BASE

  The Dulce Files, Book I

  Greg Strandberg

  Big Sky Words, Missoula

  Copyright © 2014 by Big Sky Words

  Kindle Edition, 2014

  Written in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Connect with Greg Strandberg

  www.bigskywords.com

  Table of Contents

  Prelude – Level 2

  Part I

  1 – War

  2 – Coming To

  3 – Washington

  4 – Kirtland AFB

  5 – Blue Lake

  6 – Commanders

  7 – Super Soldiers

  8 – The Grays

  9 – Tube Trains

  10 – An Assignment

  Part II

  11 – Under the Big Sky

  12 – Landing

  13 – A Nest of Grays

  14 – Debriefing

  15 – Discoveries

  16 – Drawing Lines

  17 – Different Views

  18 – A Lost Soul

  19 – Getting Equipped

  20 – In a Flash

  Part III

  21 – The X-22

  22 – Before the Attack

  23 – Down in the Tunnels

  24 – Taking Off

  25 – Drawing Near

  26 – Making Entry

  27 – The Battle for Command

  28 – Disarray Down Below

  29 – The HUB Doors

  30 – CAT-4

  Part IV

  31 – A Change of Orders

  32 – The Platform

  33 – Nightmare Hall

  34 – The Hall of Horrors

  35 – Pull-Out

  36 – Changing Course

  37 – Material Acquisition Team

  38 – Breaking Ranks

  39 – Overrun

  40 – All is Lost

  41 – Firing ‘er Up

  42 – From Above

  43 – Outta There

  Epilogue – Turning Back

  About the Author

  Prelude – Level 2

  Dulce Base – Dulce, New Mexico

  Friday, May 1, 1975

  Reggie Copeland hated Dulce Base, hated being underground, and hated being away from his trailer with its TV and fridge full of cold beer. He hated Mount Archuleta and meant to get out the first damn chance he got, and had been meaning to since he’d turned 18 nearly two decades earlier.

  He frowned and slumped over the steering wheel of the large dump truck, one with tires fifteen feet high. What the hell else am I going to do?

  As usual, Reggie had woken up about an hour before his 9 PM shift started, or more appropriately, came-to from passing out on the floor the night before, which was his typical evening procedure, although it took place before noon. After pulling himself together, finishing off a Coors, and dragging a comb through the tangled mat he called his hair, Reggie’d climbed into the cab and gotten onto U.S. Route 64, passed the one motel and one gas station that the small, sleepy town of Dulce (pop. 900) afforded, and drove the 2.5 miles to the base.

  Everyone knew Reggie, and the gates in the barbed-wire fence were opened to him and he rumbled on in, headed down the road, and reached the large tan and featureless garage. They were waiting for him – or at least that evening’s shift change – and he trundled the truck right on in the open garage doors, which were large enough to accommodate a Boeing 747.

  The garage was just that – a large garage where everyday base vehicles were repaired. It was a huge floor measuring more than 100,000 square feet, or about the size of two football fields. The place was currently full of vehicles being serviced, as it always was, though Reggie knew that sometimes it housed more. That’s why it was often call the port, a name given to ships, even though it was in the middle of the desert.

  Further back there was another set of garage doors, these much thicker and with an additional set of guards stationed at them, each with a loaded machine gun in their hands. They were the HUB doors, or what Reggie typically thought of as nuclear blast doors, and it was here that he slowed down and had a scanner put over his face, which was nothing more than some red light that passed over his face in a long narrow strip. It fed something back to the two guards and the small hand-held calculator-like thing they had, and then Reggie was waved through, just like the hundreds of times before, maybe thousands now. It wasn’t that they needed the thing – the small, black teardrop tattoo on Reggie’s right cheek set him apart from everyone else on the base – but it was just formality, just the necessary precautions they had to take with a base like Dulce.

  There were no other trucks for some reason tonight and Reggie shrugged and didn’t think much of it, just turned around the guard station and toward the right-most wall of the huge entry port and kept going, for there really was no way he could hit it, as became clear when his truck started to descend down a concrete ramp set into the floor, one no one could see from the outside of the garage or even in the first work area.

  Reggie put his foot to the gas and got moving, now that the theatrics were over. He had a good twenty miles of tunnel driving ahead of him once he made it down the ramp, most just crisscrossing this way and that as he drove deeper into the depths of Mt. Archuleta and the massive underground base it held, all 1,700 paved miles of it, not counting the 800 miles of tunnels that led to Los Alamos.

  There was the first level located 200 feet below the surface, where he’d normally check in and out and have lunch. The steel-covered cavern walls were 7 feet high and provided a sense of protection. This area was safe, for humans, and a place Reggie felt the most at ease at while at work, although he could never truly feel fully at ease. He passed the empty work buildings and cafeteria and offices and saw not a person, but kept on, for he remembered what his boss Aaron had said the day before, how today would be different.

  A sign up ahead on the concrete walls told Reggie he’d be heading to Level 7 eventually, but he knew that, having been there many times before. It was there that the long trains and shuttles were, the ones that zipped about under the surface of the earth, faster even than the supersonic jets now flying to Paris and London and called Concorde’s. It was also here that the large tunnel-boring machines were, the devices the aliens had used to make the massive and worldwide transportation network. There were also maintenance hubs for the UFO crafts that’d helped them ferry the necessary supplies and personal to get them operating.

  Reggie pressed the gas and started along. The underground base was massive, more so than even Reggie could probably comprehend, and he didn’t mean to dilly-dally – it’d take him a good forty-five minutes of circuitous driving through the ramps to get their. But while his truck might not be moving so quickly, his thoughts were. They continued on, down to Level 3, taking the same round-about and twisting tunnel turns at the end of each level that the truck would be taking soon enough. The ceilings down there rose to 25 feet high when he’d get out into the cavernous highways and turnoffs that led all over place, and then the world. But by staying on the main turnout and ramp he’d have no problems making it the 45 feet to the next level down.

  Reggie’s thoughts traveled, for there wasn’t much else for them to do. No radio was allowed in the base, not even a simple 8-track player. He’d already traveled more than a dozen miles and had barely begun to move past the faceless rows of government offices that
rose up on each side of him. The vast amounts of propaganda and misinformation they produced, and where it was directed, he could only guess at, if he ever wanted to. He drove on, again wondering where everyone was at on this day, but again not really wanting to know.

  Level 4 would be upon him eventually, and it was here that the research work on humans was done, but it was so much more than that as well. Hypnosis, telepathy, and even the manipulation of dreams were all practiced. Brain chips were implanted in ‘subjects’ and Delta Waves were used to manipulate the heart rate and brain activity of those they chose. Reggie often shuddered to think of the number of people around the world that were already being manipulated. He was positive he was one.

  The buildings rising up on either side of that level’s smoothbore tunnels were featureless, and none offered a single piece of evidence as to what they were or what was inside. Reggie had a pretty good guess from what he’d gleaned from other workers, both human and alien. One that always stuck with him were the specially-made rooms made of lead, covered in magnetically-coated steel, and then covered yet again, this time with copper. Such measures were necessary to hold the living aural essences, or souls, of those cosmic beings that didn’t require bodies. Reggie also knew that those rooms had been twisted and warped and now did unspeakable things, acts only reserved for God. Sometimes Reggie wondered if God wasn’t enslaved somewhere down in the deepest levels, however, the ones even he didn’t know existed.

  The place was dead at the moment, something he’d never seen before. Glancing down at the odometer, Reggie knew he’d travelled twelve miles already and hadn’t seen a soul. Normally he’d be checked and rechecked again before being allowed in here. But not today, and maybe never again.

  Level 5 would come after Level 4, and as Reggie steered the truck toward the first curves that would take him to Level 2, he felt a cold come over him as his thoughts raced ahead, one not of temperature but of guilt. It always came when he thought of Level 4, for beyond it was Level 5, and where the vats were.

  He’d never forget the first time he saw them upon rounding the turn and coming onto the level for the first time, rows and rows of them as far as he could see, a forest of them stretching to the far and distant walls of the cavern that was that level. How many humans were there Reggie had no idea, but if he had to guess he’d say thousands, tens of thousands. Although he knew that wasn’t quite right – many of the things in those vats couldn’t be called human anymore. Many of them never were.

  The vats were about 10 feet high and full of amber or green liquid. Most of those closest to the tunnel road were full of human body parts – disembodied arms and legs, the occasional torso and sometimes head, the eyes staring wide and lifelessly out at all passers-by. Reggie tried not to look when he drove through the level, but he always found himself taking a few glances at the vats despite himself. It was what was beyond them that made his hackles rise.

  Housed in cages that were perhaps dozens of rows deep were whimpering and crying and screaming humans, and some that were no longer human and that had never been. They cried out for help, for mercy, for death, for their mothers. Reggie had made the mistake one day of having his window rolled partly-down when driving through and had heard some of them, the things they said, the places they were from, their names, their kids’ names. He never made that mistake again.

  Reggie shook off the thought as he entered the circular ramp that’d take him down to Level 2, the ramp reserved for big vehicles like his, and which took forever to get down at 5 mph. But Reggie’s thoughts raced ahead of his vehicle once again, this time to Level 6, Nightmare Hall. The name wasn’t a misnomer, either – the place really was the stuff of nightmares. Reggie steered the truck down the curving ramps to Level 2 but imagined instead he was entering Level 6, for he’d always quickly be awash in the pinkish-red light that illuminated the area. And what an area it was! The floors were made of latex and covered with row upon row of cages. If the vats upstairs gave Reggie the chills, these down here damn near gave him a heart attack from fright. He kept his eyes level, straight ahead, never daring to look to his side when he was driving through, even when the Reptilians, the Draco race as they were officially called, had the run of the place.

  He still remembered the sight of those…things in the cages. Some had half-human half-animal combinations. There’d been the ‘man’ with the hands of a seal and the ‘legs’ as well. A woman that looked more like a unicorn, dogs with human heads, bat-like humans that were 7 feet tall, and things that looked like ten people all stuck together, their faces a mask of bewilderment, pain and anguish. It was the stuff of nightmares, there was no denying it.

  The Reptilians were something else entirely. They wore no clothes, just a sort of utility belt that held some of its weapons, and had large claw-like talons on their dinosaur-like feet. What always sent a shiver down Reggie’s spine, however, were the yellow, slit-serpentine eyes shining out of those hideous, scaled-bodies. That and the God-awful hissing sound they made when angry. It was they who came to the cages and fed the creatures, and the humans that had yet to be turned into them. And feeding was no easy task. Because of the level of genetic experimentation that’d gone on, several liquid substances needed to be prepared each day, all given out according to the…things’ needs.

  The proper name for Level 6 was the ‘Vivarium,’ although what the hell that meant Reggie didn’t really have a clue. He remembered when he’d first started at the base, when they’d still been passing the Manual around. It’d described Level 6 as “a private subterranean bio-terminal park, with accommodations for animals, fish, fowl, reptile, and mankind.” That was one way of putting it, but there was no way Reggie was ever going to think of cages and tanks as ‘accommodations.’

  And of course those poor souls were nothing more than chattel, sustenance for the Grays, the dying race that’d started it all, from outer space that is. It began with a few abductions, then the treaties, but when humans proved incapable of giving them all they needed, cattle were turned to. How long those mutilations would be able to be kept quiet was beyond Reggie, but he suspected not much longer. And God did he hope so. The blood of the animals, and that from many of the humans as well, was used to keep the Grays alive, put into the vats where the creatures bathed and soaked up the life essence. The plasma and amniotic fluid were the best, the prime rib of the humans as far as the Grays were concerned. Thankfully they sated themselves on parasitic plants as well, the sap from some even capable of ‘powering’ them for months.

  Reggie shook off the thought and slowed the vehicle as he finally came out of the last of the long and winding ramp from Level 1…and immediately narrowed his eyes.

  Is that what I think…sure enough, it was. Three Zeta Reticulan Grays were standing there, the tall grey bastards with big black eyes, no nose to speak of, and that slit mouth that never spoke. Most of the time they were just called ‘Ret. Four’s,’ meaning they were from the fourth planet of the Zeta II Reticuli system, and where the hell that was Reggie had no idea. These ones were a slight shade of green, Reggie noticed, meaning they hadn’t ‘fed’ in awhile, and were more likely to be vicious because of it.

  That wasn’t really what had Reggie’s attention, however. It was the large group of military personnel – the first he’d seen since entering the base – that really threw him. All had weapons, something that wasn’t odd but wasn’t that common either, and the air in the place had an edge to it, something Reggie could feel even from the safety of his cab. He stopped the vehicle a good hundred yards from the group, who, he now saw, were right near the recently installed antimatter reactor. He rolled down the window of the cab and then crouched down in the seat as best he could, staying out of sight, listening, just like he had in the mud in Vietnam.

  Outside in the tunnel a hundred yards away looked to be fifty scientists accompanied by about half as many soldiers. The soldiers all had machine guns while ahead of them the Grays had flash guns. Colonel Michaels saw this and f
rowned, then stepped forward.

  “We’re here for the presentation, like you asked. What do–”

  “Quiet,” one of the Gray’s said, or more properly ‘sent,’ for the word was ‘heard’ in everyone’s mind but not by a single ear. Even Reggie back in the truck a hundred yards away got the message loud and clear.

  Colonel Michaels closed his mouth and firmed his jaw and stared into the large black eyes on the Gray’s oversized head. He’d long ago gotten over his fear of the things, knowing that they sensed that emotion miles away, like they did all irrational thought. It was keeping the mind rational, logical, but also skipping about in abstract ways that weren’t easy to follow telepathically, that was the secret to undermining the Gray’s dominant hold in all situations with the humans, of which there were increasingly many.

  The Gray stared back at him, then sent out the message, “disarm.”

  “What?” Colonel Michaels said, looking from that leading Gray to its two companions gathered around the antimatter reactor. “What do you mean ‘disarm?’ We’ve never had to do that before.”

  “You’ll do it now,” another message came, this one seemingly from one of the other Grays, although how Colonel Michaels or any of the others could tell was beyond their ability to explain.

  Colonel Michaels shook his head. “I won’t.”

  There was no message this time, just the feeling imparted that that was that, the conversation was over, as was the meeting and everyone’s life. It was known instantly, as you’d know a breeze was blowing your hair.

  Colonel Michaels reacted and managed to get his right hand up, the one holding his machine gun, a fraction of an inch, or about as much as he could in a few fractions of a second. After that the psionic blast from the leading Gray in front of him cut into his forehead and blew his brains out the back of his head as sure as a gunshot at point blank range would. Brain-matter flew all over the soldiers behind him, but they were trained and didn’t hesitate as their commander’s body began falling to the floor. Neither did the Grays.