A Note from the Editor:
Original fiction doesn't come through our door often, and horror fiction even less so. Clay Boone is a returning FC contributor, and for his second piece he's given us something entirely different from his first: a short horror story called The Gray.
It starts with a soldier seeing something over Baghdad he was never meant to see. It ends somewhere much stranger. Clay has also recorded a full audio version of the story, which you can listen to HERE.
If you're a writer with an original short story, flash fiction, or poem you'd like to share with our readers, we'd love to hear from you.
-Enjoy, Mike
The Gray, by Clay Boone
Ever since I could crawl, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the dark and mysterious corners of existence. As a child in Sunday school, I would bombard my teachers with questions about ghosts, heaven, hell, and aliens from other planets. Do aliens believe in God? How come the bible doesn’t talk about them? My teachers gave me little more than strange looks and vague answers, never satisfying my curiosity.
It often happened that the Sunday school teachers, fearing for my soul, would report my curiosity to my parents. On one particular evening, my parents pulled me aside in the parking lot after church. “We’re fed up, Jacob,” mother said. “There are some things we aren’t meant to know. That’s why God tells us to have faith. Faith is the only answer the world needs.”
Bah! Blindly follow? Don’t ask questions? In my youth I would never accept such things. Faith was simply one more vague answer for people who lacked imagination. However, now that I am older and much wiser, I wish I’d accepted her answer.
My journey into adulthood began with my uncle Aaron. He would get liquored up and fill my head with his stories about the Vietnam war. I could always see a dark painful yearning in him when he talked about the war. Like a deep-seated balance between love and hate, horror and thrill. Something awful that fulfilled a need yet left a void, full of lost friends and broken meaning. It was a darkness that I longed to understand, in part because he was a man who people were afraid of. He had seen things and knew things others couldn’t imagine. This enticed me to know more about the wicked mysteries of war, and to escape the dirt road town of Chester, Illinois.
In 2002, barely 18 years old, I joined the US Army as a 94-Charlie, a radio and communications security repair man. Not long after basic training and AIT, Bush began the invasion of Iraq. They sent me to serve with the 3rd Infantry Division.
Within a month of the short-lived toppling of Baghdad, I began to be sick of the smoke. It was everywhere. It made the sky look sick. It stuck to my clothes. Even the water we drank stank of burning. There was smoke from the burning oil fields, smoke from the guns, artillery, and bombs. Each type of smoke had a distinct smell. The worst was the burning bodies; a scent like seared pork, something I once enjoyed.
There were unfathomable sights of destruction. I could describe my first kill or my friend blown to bits, but all those things seem small compared to what I saw through all that smoke before entering the city.
It was me and the five others in my squad. Around us, endless gunshots cracked the air like thunder. There were flashes and explosions, near and far. When our point man gave pause, we thought he’d been struck with combat fatigue; he just froze, staring up at the sky. So we followed his gaze to see three glimmering silver disks, glinting in the sun as they floated in the sky above us. Upon casting my eyes on the objects, I felt a buzzing sound that rattled my skull, making my mind vibrate like an engine without oil. I gritted my teeth so hard I thought they’d break; amidst the heat of battle I was paralyzed.
“What the fuck!” I exclaimed. Someone behind me took aim at a disc and tried to light it up with the SAW. Then, with a blinding flash, the three UFOs collided. When I opened my eyes, the three objects had become one, and within a blink it shot away across the sky
Later that evening we found a place to take shelter from the fighting. We ate our MREs and puffed on cigs to unwind. I took a long drag then let it out; little things like this still made me happy.
“Tell me I’m not the only one that saw those flying saucers! That ringing made my head feel like it was going to explode!” Deavers said. He was a nervous, lanky fellow who loved to talk. The rest of the squad looked relieved they weren’t crazy, others wished they were.
A first sergeant who was walking by overheard Deavers. He grabbed Deavers by the shirt and slammed him against a wall. “What the fuck did you just say soldier?! You think you saw something?!”
The first sergeant was a short, bulky, angry little man.
“I was just…” Deavers began. First sergeant rattled him again. “I didn’t see anything,” Deavers said.
“Nobody did!” First sergeant said, turning to address the rest of us.
In the years to come, those flying saucers plagued my mind. I joined the army to answer dark questions inside of me, to understand the painful yearning behind a vet’s eyes. But when I drank from that cup of madness, I swallowed more than I should have. That day revisits me in dreams of those smoke filled skies until I’m violently awoken by that deafening buzzing sound. I began switching off the breaker in my home to eliminate any hint of the hum of electricity. Christ, I was like one of those tin foil hat wearing weirdos.
I thought about seeking help, but Deavers proved that was a dangerous waste of time. He sought help from the service, and they diagnosed him with combat fatigue. The VA put him on disability and drowned his head in pills until he killed himself. I always wondered if Deavers suffered from the same things that were keeping me up at night. Nothing was enough to quiet my unquenched mind as it yearned for answers.
When 2010 rolled around, I left the military to begin my college career. I studied aeronautics, a personal passion, and I did better in school than I’d ever hoped. In my free time I would read about an alien race known as the Grays, named for their skin hue. They had bulbous heads and long slender bodies. They were often reported flying in silver ships like levitating discs.
I learned that in the earliest recordings of the Grays, they were seen taking samples of earth and plant matter. In the 1950’s, there were reports of animal abduction, most commonly livestock. During the 1960’s, a majority of reports had to do with human abduction. By the 1980’s, many people reported insemination and sexual contact. Contact dwindled from then on, it’s been mostly just sightings of ships since then. I always suspected that they were waiting for something... some new source of data.
In 2014, I graduated college at the top of my class. All of my late nights studying and early mornings in lectures had paid off. I was getting job offers left and right. With my ego larger than ever, I decided to chase down my dreams. I applied for an Aeronautic radio repair position at Area 51.
The application was extensive, and the interview was more so. I was asked about every personal question you could imagine, some of which would make a whore blush. The man who interviewed me maintained a poker face the entire time. This made me more of a nervous wreck than I already was. It was a grueling hour before it was over.
“Why are you so nervous Jacob? Are you hiding something?” The poker faced man asked.
“No,” I said. “I just don’t want to mess this up.”
The poker face curled into a smile. “You did well. Once the six month background check goes through, the job is yours.”
I was ecstatic! Yet I couldn’t tell a soul or I’d risk the job. So I bought expensive scotch and toasted my success with my cat, Benny. My childhood dream would be fulfilled, my questions would be answered. The light at the end of the tunnel was close enough to touch, but was the light what it seemed?
On my first day, an aging security officer showed me around the facility, explaining where I could go and where I could not. Top Secret didn't mean much by itself. Most doors still stayed locked unless your name belonged to whatever program lived behind them. My job opened more of them than most because broken radios had a habit of turning up everywhere. Security access was confirmed via facial scanner, so I couldn’t just grab a key card and waltz in. But I had my foot in the door.
The west end was different. Nothing from there ever came through my shop, and nobody I knew had access. UFO nuts online called it Hangar 18, though that wasn’t its real name. The actual designation was so dull I laughed the first time I heard it:
Building 18, West Annex, Section Red, Bay 12.
I was like a kid in a candy store.
Every other day I would have radio equipment brought to my shop for troubleshooting and repair. Sometimes I’d be sent outside of my shop to work on various larger equipment and vehicles. I was amazed at the breakthroughs they had made in the field of acoustics. There was a frequency for almost everything, from object levitation to weaponry, from murder to mind control.
The mind control was basic, but it was still amazing. They were able to stir specific emotions with small vibrational frequencies within the ear. The earliest testing of these frequencies was performed in Vietnam. Helicopters with giant speakers played frequencies of 0.5 to 10 hertz in known enemy areas. It caused psychological changes such as fear, depression, anxiety, chest pressure, nausea, and for some, hallucinations. Modern police and military use similar means for non-lethal crowd control. However, certain exposure could cause madness or even death.
It all made me think back to Deavers and Baghdad. That ear splitting buzz… my mind is alight with it even now. Just the thought of it makes me gnash my teeth.
After a year had passed, I couldn’t prove that the place housed anything from another world.
That bothered me more than it should have.
By that time, I began to gain the trust of the guards and my coworkers. I began to learn where the technology I worked on came from and where it was going. Everything was sorted via color coded security factors: blue could be taken outside of the facility; green remained in the facility; and red was equipment used in classified areas of the facility. I set aside anything with a red dot and installed a tiny microphone inside. The security officers that examined equipment going into the classified areas did a half-ass job.
Typical waste of tax dollars... bad for taxpayers, good for me.
The bugs didn't transmit inside the facility. Even I wasn't stupid enough to try that. Once the equipment returned to an unrestricted part of the base, the device connected long enough to dump its recordings to a server I controlled. Because of the size of the microphones, I spent a lot of time sifting through silence and poor sound quality. During many sleepless nights I’d go through packs of cigarettes and pots of coffee like water through a storm drain. Exhaustion overwhelmed my body and my mind. I often intended to take a week off work to finally get a night’s sleep, however, I always did the contrary.
My cup was filled to the brim with questions about universal secrets, and not one of them had an answer.
All else was a waste of time.
I’m ashamed to say my house slowly began looking like a troll’s den. Microwavable meal trays, cigarette packs, and water bottles littered the floor. Light rarely came in except for when Benny would paw through the blinds to peak out.
From thousands of hours of recordings, there were two of great significance. The first was recorded in a cryogenics lab where new recruits were trained with a Gray cadaver. The instructor guided the new recruit through a lesson on dissection.
Their organs were very similar to ours. Their digestive tract was much shorter and its acids did not break down organic matter as well as ours, so their diets consisted of softer foods of unknown matter. They had one kidney or one kidney and a malformed second. It was common for the instructor to point out their broken necks, especially if the cadaver was recovered from a crash site. Their necks were so thin that violent whipping of the neck would cause them to break, because their bulbous heads were too much to hold up. Their vocal cords didn’t have the full range humans do, although they were capable of speaking in human languages. Apparently, they'd known English longer than we'd known they existed. It was understandable if you listened carefully.
This point brings me to my second finding.
I was able to get audio recording of a live Gray speaking to Lt. General John Shanahan. The recorder that caught Shanahan wasn't supposed to record anything. It was part of a conference communications unit that kept dropping audio and had passed through my bench three times that year.
Whether that was luck or a curse was yet to be seen.
Shanahan fired questions left and right. What could America do to secure power for the next hundred years? How did quantum travel work? Could it be weaponized? What were their kind doing on Earth?
The Gray answered the first few questions patiently, although there was something strange in its voice that made it difficult to tell patience from annoyance. It told Shanahan that which nation held power a hundred years from now was a moot point.
Shanahan pressed him anyway, as if prompting a computer.
“What replaces us?”
There was a long silence.
“You continue to misunderstand.”
Shanahan let a sharp breath through his nose and asked again about quantum travel, his voice sharper now. The Gray told him humanity would discover it within the next few decades. Then Shanahan wanted to know which country would discover it first.
That seemed to be the question that finally angered the thing.
Its voice rose.
It told the general that mankind was approaching the end of its information and technological era. The next great advancement would not be machines, but biology. Genetically altered plants and animals would begin replacing much of the natural world. Parents would eventually order traits for their children like food from a menu. Greater intelligence. Regulated weight. Resistance to disease, chemicals, heat and cold.
Shanahan interrupted.
“And the military applications?”
Then it lost control for the first time.
“Your genome will eat the consequences of your insatiable lust for power. Do you not understand?!”
Silence.
When it spoke again, the anger was gone.
Calm now.
Further down the generational line, it said, human beings would become unrecognizable. Changes would be built upon changes until no one remembered what the original body had been designed to do. Improvements would solve one problem and create another. By the time the damage became apparent, there would be no untouched population left to return to.
“That is why we are here, General Shanahan. We have taken samples of your kind across generations, searching for the point at which we began to fail. The oldest samples show us what we were. They do not tell us where we went wrong.”
Shanahan didn't say anything.
The Gray continued.
“In our time and dimension, what we believed to be evolution had major drawbacks.”
Then came the words I wish I'd never heard.
“We are you, General Shanahan.”
My head felt light at those words. I wanted to vomit. I’m sure the general felt the same way. All the audio remaining was him saying, “Oh my god,” over and over as he stormed out of the room, slammed the door, and bolted it shut.
Quitting felt worse than calling in. Quitting was an action and actions brought attention. So every Sunday night I'd tell myself I'd go back Monday morning, and every Monday I'd invent another excuse.
I couldn’t go back to work;
I couldn’t even leave the house. Why did I have to spend my life sticking my nose in things? Now my nose had gotten in deeper shit than I’d ever imagined. I’d call in with a different excuse every week. I could no longer eat the garbage I ate before. I’d pay the neighbor boy to pick me up organic food to drop off at my door, otherwise it felt like I was swallowing poison.
I kept my electricity off most of the day now, because of the God-awful buzzing. I wanted to tell someone, but who would believe me? What’s more, who would be able to do anything about it? Not even the brightest minds were there yet.
I burned through my sick leave first. Then annual leave. By the third week my supervisor stopped calling and security started.
That’s when I’d hear knocking at the door, but I wouldn’t answer. Once it was a policeman, to do a ‘health and wellness check’. I yelled I was alive and well, and to get a warrant.
My mail began to come to me half opened, and the cars were harder to explain.
Sometimes there was a black sedan across the street after dark. Other nights it was a white pickup, or nothing at all. Once I stood behind the blinds for nearly an hour, certain somebody was sitting inside a car with the engine off. When I finally worked up the nerve to step outside, it was empty.
Then, two nights later, the black sedan was back.
Its headlights came on just as I moved away from the window.
The car might've belonged to somebody visiting the apartments across the street.
I told myself that twice.
Then I noticed it parked there the next night.
Was I losing it? I was sure they suspected something by now. Nearly a month off work with bullshit excuses. I decided to check the recordings just to see. My hands trembled on the mouse, as I navigated to my login.
First time didn’t work, no account found. I checked my emails for my membership but found nothing. So, I tried again.
No account found.
I tried one last time with no results.
I'd made copies at first. Two hard drives and a stack of discs. After hearing the Gray, I spent an entire night destroying them. I smashed the drives with a framing hammer and burned the discs in the backyard. By morning the cloud account was the only copy left.
I couldn't make myself erase the last one.
Maybe I'd screwed something up. Maybe months without sleep had finally eaten a hole through my memory. But the account was gone.
No… Wait…
I should have thought.
Everybody knew major search engines and cloud providers made back-end deals with information buyers.
Shit.
I had to leave Nevada.
I waited till after 6am and left with Benny and some basic necessities. I emptied what I could from the bank, bought enough prepaid cards to handle anything that wouldn't take cash, and left the rest behind.
I ditched my own car before I crossed the state line and bought an old Ford off a man who cared more about the cash in my hand than the name on my license. I drove the truck north to Montana. I once read that there are more animals per acre than people in Montana.
For the first two days I expected helicopters every time I heard an engine overhead.
But nothing came.
That scared me worse than if they had.
It’s been three years now. I now live with Benny in an undisclosed area in the woods. I have a small generator for when it gets really cold. I gather my own fire wood, catch my own game. If I need money I’ll do some summer work here and there. It’s an hour hike to town if I need anything. I do get lonely sometimes, and I’m teased by suicidal thoughts. I think of Deavers driven to suicide. Like Deavers, perhaps one day my river will meet the sea, by my own hand. Maybe if I become too curious with the mysteries of death.
For now, I continue to carry what I know like an anvil on my back. Remembering the words of my mother, I sometimes find myself flipping through the pages of my bible. Ignorance is indeed bliss, especially when you choke on your own curiosities.
And sometimes…
Even when the generator is off and there’s nothing but the wind and the creek.
I still hear it.
That fucking hum.
AUTHOR BIO:
Clay Boone is the author of Where Shadows Are the Darkest. He grew up in rural Missouri, where stories about the Civil War and Reconstruction were passed down through generations by word of mouth. That sense of lived history shapes everything he writes. His work blends the brutal realities of the post-war South with folklore, fear, and the religious tensions of the period. It is not gunsmoke and glory. It is the copper taste of blood, the smell of last night's fire, and the burning in your lungs when you run.
Visit ClayBoone.com
Buy The Book on Amazon: Where Shadows Are the Darkest
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