Dulce Truths

Light suddenly bursts into Tommy’s vision, though it’s yellow and bright and white and everything that the sun or overhead lighting is not. Then he realizes that he’s on the ceiling, or at least in the upper corner of the room. Most strange of all, however, was the sight of his own body on the cold steel slab of the makeshift operating room. It’s then that Tommy knows he’ss dead. It’s not until a few moments later, however, when Stu turns around and begins looking up at the ceiling, waving his hand as he does so, that Tommy knows Etheria had been activated.

My God, he thinks as he floats there, disembodied and lifeless, I really am dead… we really are doing this….we–

“Tommy.”

Tommy’s thoughts are cutoff as Stu calls out his name, still looking toward the ceiling. The young soldier knows that Stu knows he’s there.

“Tommy, I know you’re here,” Stu says next. “We’re going with Etheria, we’re going to try and buck the light. You were killed in Dulce but the shot we gave you years ago was waiting to kick in, and it did. It kept your brain functions alive and attached to your body. Now you’re on your own.” Stu reaches over and grabs hold of some kind of medical devices that his hands wrap around, then holds them up. “You’ve got twenty minutes, Tommy, twenty minutes before I jerk you back to life… if I can.” He looks down, a tinge of sadness coming to his face, but only for a moment before he looks up again. “We’ll get you back, Tommy, don’t you worry about that, we’ll get you back, just don’t go toward the light, whatever you do, don’t—”

Stu’s words are cutoff, though only to Tommy. For it’s at that instant that a bright white tunnel of light suddenly appears before him, blocking out all other sights and sounds. It’s warm, inviting, and contains all the love in the world. Tommy wants to go to it, desperately wants to go to it, but he holds himself back. It’s a trick, he knows, for his Etheria training has taught him such.

A moment later the white light seems to sense this, sense his apprehension, for it pulsates, sends out more warm feelings, but in the midst of that, Tommy notices the slightest trace of coldness, fear, and hate. The light notices that he notices, and that’s when the room around him drops away, and he’s suddenly in the deep blackness of space.

Fear grips Tommy, though a kind he’d never known before. This is the fear that can only come to the dead, when they know that death won’t even save them from the unspeakable horror that suddenly confronts them. Tommy is confronted with that now, and he doesn’t know if he can take it.

The training back at Blue Lake in ’68 had been explicit — the light would only last for the length of a meal.

They’d all questioned that, but that’s all the instructor could tell them. It wasn’t an exact science, after all, dying and seeing a light and then not going toward it.

To most it’d flown in the face of every notion they’d ever had. You should always go toward the light, for that light held your family, friends, and eventually God. It was all a trick, though, one designed by the Grays to steal the souls before they could pass to that place that the white light was thought to signify. The Grays needed the souls, for they had none. Something about the soul’s energy fed them, though not like food fed a dying man; more like how a drug fed a junkie’s fix.

No one knew how long it’d been going on, the harvesting of souls, but the American government had known about it since the year after Eisenhower signed the treaty. That’s when they began exploring it, researching it, trying to figure out how it worked.

It took ten years, but they’d done it, though the cost had been high. More than three dozen men had volunteered to be killed on a table, their heart stopped with anesthetic or electric shocks. All were promised that they’d be brought back. None of them had been, not a one.

Tommy knew that, knew it right away when Stu called out to him in that hospital room. He was thirty-one, and there’d be no coming back.

He firms his resolve. He’s a soldier, one meant to fight Grays. If they wanted a fight, he’d give ‘em one. The light pulses, sensing his decision, knowing it has another.

Tommy feels the pulse, senses the love, but also the underlying ‘something’ that isn’t quite right lying right under the surface. He backs off, fled, overcoming his fear and goes out into the deep blackness of space. He’s going still when the feeling of aloneness hits him for the first time. He looks back, and the light is gone.

All around him is blackness, the blackness of space, the void, nothingness… death.

And then something else happens. It isn’t a light, but more a feeling. The overpowering feeling of love and life and friends and happiness. Tommy knows this is the true light, the one that most miss, the one the Grays can only block for a short time.

Tommy goes toward it, goes toward it and hopes he’s right. The fate of Man’s soul is riding on it.