Survive This Book · Book 4

First Contact

1

At ten fifty-eight on a Tuesday night, the stars over New Mexico start going out in rows, and you are the only person on Earth holding the thing they came for.

The last ordinary conversation of your life is about Indiana Jones.

You are twelve feet down a trench in the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, with an army-surplus Iridium wedged against your shoulder and a disk of black basalt balanced across both palms. A hundred and sixty miles north, your brother is laughing at you.

“Say the part about the script again,” Theo says.

“It’s older than the script. It’s older than anything.” You tilt the disk into your headlamp. Eight glyphs sit in a ring around its face, cut so clean they hold the light like wet ink. “Four thousand years in caliche, Theo, and the edges are sharp. Nothing stays sharp for four thousand years. I’m not sharp after four hours.”

“You’re not sharp after lunch.” Behind him, through his open window, you can hear Albuquerque. He is twenty-six and fine, and some part of you that never came home from the valley loosens a notch. “Come up for air, Jules. You’ve been in that hole nine hours. Even Indiana Jones slept.”

“Indiana Jones was a vandal with a whip.”

“Jules.”

The disk gets warm.

The heat starts inside the stone and climbs, and the glyphs brighten under your thumbs from black to furnace orange. Every hair on your arms lifts. It’s suddenly too hot to hold, and you set it down fast on the sorting bench, palms stinging.

Twelve feet above you, at the ragged mouth of the trench, a star goes out.

Then the one beside it. Then a whole row, left to right, clean as a hand wiping a slate.

“Jules?” His voice changes. You have heard that change once before, the night the hospital called about your mother. Behind him the city makes a sound no city should make, something vast and low you feel in your fillings. “Jules, the sky’s...”

The phone dies, and so does every diode in the trench. This brick has survived two floods and a drop off a mesa. It does not survive this. The sky above you fills, rim to rim, with a cold geometric light, and the light is moving. It slides over the desert in long straight lines, searching.

At the lip of the trench a pack rat breaks from the spoil heap and runs. A sliver of that light drops onto it, and the rat is gone, and so is the light.

You have spent your whole life being the smartest man in the hole. The hole has never mattered less.

- To climb out and sprint for the truck, turn to 251 .

- To grab the disk off the bench and get it out of the hole with you, turn to 87 .

- To kill the headlamp and get flat on the trench floor, turn to 161 .