My Search for Answers, Part III

I had an odd dream last night. At least, the parts that I could remember were odd. I was alone somewhere, maybe a wide open field of some kind. When I looked up to the sky, the normally bright blue color was replaced with a deep, midnight dark blue color. But it wasn't just a solid color, however. It was intermixed with various strands and rivers of other colors, almost like if you were looking at the arms of the Milky Way Galaxy at night. But these patterns undulated and coursed throughout the heavens, seemingly randomly. Looking upon these shapes and patterns, filled me with a strange mixture of emotions. I felt equal parts dread and despair, as I did calmness and acceptance. It's not an emotion that I could replicate in my waking mind.

I awoke in the townhouse on the couch I was sleeping on. Not a horrible nights sleep, at least, all things considered. It was a little rough getting to sleep at first, with that other heavy storm that passed over, but this one didn't seem as intense as the one at the warehouse the night prior. Once it passed, I was able to fall asleep basically immediately.

Sitting up now on the couch, I attempted to turn my phone on, to no avail. Well at least that's consistent. I remembered that I was able to power on my laptop last night, but I still wanted to wait for everyone else to wake up and come downstairs before showing them. Ron came down first, then Adam. A little while later, Marco followed suit. Ron had some cans of iced coffee, though no ice, sitting in a pantry and offered us all each a can. I graciously accepted. We sat around in the living room, just chatting about if we slept well. I talked a little bit with Marco, seeing as he was my fellow brother in arms in the customer service industry, about his job at 7/11. He joked about how he would steal the same coffee drinks from the back storage room all the time. I jokingly offered to recommend him a job at Costco, to which he declined saying "Nah that place is probably haunted now." A bit of morbid humor, but I didn't take offense.

After taking some time for everyone to wake up, Ron turned to Adam and asked him "Alright Adam, seems like you've got a lotta stuff you wanna tell us. You ready?"

Adam takes a sip from his coffee, then sets it down on the coffee table. "Yeah, sure. I'm gonna start with a disclaimer though, if you thought what Wayne was talking about last night was crazy, well, he might be one of the more saner sounding people after what I have to say."

My eyes widened a little, and my attention was now squarely focused on Adam. Initially I was doubtful of that, but at this point, everything so far had been unprecedented. I was willing to take any and all information I could get. "Hey man," I said in a reassuring way. "Tell us whatever is on your mind. We're all in the same boat at this point. No use hiding anything, no matter how crazy it sounds." He nodded to me, realizing that I was in a similar position just last night explaining my story.

"Alright. Let me start with this then. We're in California, correct?"

The three of us glanced at each other for a moment. "Y-yeah?" Ron answered, confused. "Livermore to be exact."

"Right. That should not be possible, for me at least." Adam said, putting emphasis on the word "not." We all made a confused look towards him. "I should be at my air force base right now."

"Where are you supposed to be stationed?" Ron asked. I sat back and let Ron do some questioning here, considering he has military experience.

"Langley."

"Langley...Langley...," Ron thought. "Virginia?"

"Yes."

"On the entire other end of the country?" Ron asked, dumbfounded.

"Yes."

"But...how? And what do you mean that's where you're supposed to be? You AWOL?"

Adam quickly put his hands up defensively and shook his head. "No, no of course not. What I mean by that is, I was THERE yesterday. I was at Langley literally an hour before I got your attention when I saw you from over on the side of the freeway." He gestures out the window in the general direction of the freeway. So that's how these two met, I noted to myself.

Marco sets his coffee can down quite loudly, also dumbfounded. "Bro, you're just telling us this now? Why didn't you tell us sooner?" I raised one of my hands just slightly in a way to let Marco know to bring it down a little bit.

"It all seemed...impossible. I couldn't make sense of anything that happened last night. I didn't want to show up as a stranger talking about some crazy stuff like that, didn't seem like it would be a good idea. But now that I, or rather, we all know that something is going on, I'm more confident that I can speak freely about it."

"It's all good, son. We won't hold it against you." Ron assured him. "Not everyone should be a walking encyclopedia for everyone to read. Anyways, keep talking, what more you got for us?"

Adam continued. "Well it was already late into the night over there on the east coast. Midnight, or close to it, I think. I was doing the rounds on base, talking to some of my buddies over there about work stuff. Someone mentioned some blips on the tower radar, so we went to take a look. We get radar issues like that from time to time, could have been a flock of birds, or whatever. Anyway, I get up to the tower where we have the radar screen, and the entire screen is lit up bright green."

Ron asked him, "Like, just solid green? No gaps, no breaks in the radar screen?"

"Not a single one. We chalked it up to a malfunction, think the tech guys were gonna run a reset on the system. I was already headed back down to go to my barracks. Last thing I remember though, I turned a corner around the barracks, and in the blink of an eye, I'm on the side of a freeway. The one down over there past the embankment." Adam motioned in the general direction of the freeway again. "I didn't even feel anything. It felt as natural as walking from one room to the next one. I was just...here now."

"Ok." I said, taking a moment before saying what I said next. "So somehow you were teleported against your will from the east coast all the way over here to the west coast?" I looked at him concerningly. "That must have been...crazy to go through man."

"Well, it's not the worst thing I've gone through. Extremely odd, sure, but I mean, I'm not injured or anything like that. I should probably be thankful I didn't get vivisected or something." Adam said.

"That's a good way to look at it." Ron said. "Now, think back if you can. Did you notice any other weird things happening before you ended up over here?"

"...the sky." Adam said. "and the weather." He looked out the window to the still overcast skies outside. "It was similar to this, but the clouds, or something in them, was different."

"How so?" Marco asked, trying to be relevant in the conversation.

"I'm not sure, it's just a feeling. I'm not the kind of person that has their mood affected by the weather. After all, I'm expected to fly in all sorts of weather conditions. But those clouds made me feel...some kind of way. Depressed? I couldn't tell you to be honest."

"That's fine. You're here now, and safe. Anything else?" Ron asked him.

"No, I think that's everything. I'll let you guys know if I think of anything else." Adam concluded.

I thought back to when I was walking the overpass yesterday, and saw Adam down there looking through cars. That must have been right after he got teleported over here. He was probably just as confused as I was, searching around for any signs of people. I probably should have called out to him when I saw him.

"Well, it's good we got that little bit of info from you," Ron remarked. "Unfortunately, I don't really have anything to add to this whole deal. I was just sitting here watching the game, beer in hand, when the power went out. Can't say I noticed any electrical issues, teleporting, or crazy things like that leading up to the storm. Marco, what about you?"

"Uhhhh," Marco sheepishly said, "I'm not gonna front, I was a bit high yesterday when I was at work. Same deal, don't really remember anything crazy either." We all chuckled a bit.

"Well, we've gone from now knowing what's going on to...." Ron paused for a moment. "...still not knowing what's going on. Amazing."

"Ugh," I said, "and that's what really bothers me. I was hoping to get back home and maybe getting access to the internet. Maybe try to look up and see if anyone has figured this stuff out. But I'm gonna have to wait a little while longer for that I guess. Oh yeah, speaking of the internet, I have this old laptop with me that, surprisingly, still has power." I told everyone while grabbing it from my backpack.

"Oh shit, no way" Marco said. "My phone is still shot. Everyone else's is still messed up too, yeah?" We all nodded.

"I don't know how useful this will be, but having a functional laptop for the time being has to be worthwhile, right?" I asked.

"Could be." Ron noted. "But the wifi went out with the power, so what can we do with it?" Ron stopped for a moment, an idea brewing in his head. "Hold on, that thing got an ethernet port on it?"

"Yeah it does." I pointed to the port on the side.

"Gimme a sec, this'll be a longshot." Ron headed upstairs into a room and began rummaging around. He returned downstairs with a cardboard box full of various wires, gadgets, things of that sort. It was the kind of box every household had tucked away somewhere that contained various cables from old electronics that, on the off chance needed replacing, would have available. "My buddy, the house this belongs to, used to mess around with shit like HAM radio and things of the sort. I wanna see if he left that satellite phone we found at a garage sale in here. Maybe I can hook it up to your laptop."

"Woah, that would be insanely lucky if you could get that to work." I said. "Yeah let's try." Ron continued to rummage through the box, which was absolutely filled to the top with mechanical bits and pieces. It looked like junk to the untrained eye. First he pulled out a cable that had an ethernet ending on it, then he found what he was really looking for. "There's the sucker, gotcha." He pulls out what looked like a small cinder block of a tech device. This was the satellite phone he was talking about. He flicked the power switch over to the on position, but the buttons did not function. "Batteries, I think they're dead. Shit."

"Think your buddy has more around here somewhere?" Marco said, standing up and heading to the kitchen drawers to maybe find some replacements.

"Maybe, but I doubt this thing just takes your normal AA or AAA batteries. Probably gonna need one of those other ones, like..."

"9-Volt?" Marco asked, holding up a sealed package of them he found in a drawer.

Ron turned the phone over, checking the label on the back. "Yerp, those are the ones. Hand 'em over." Ron swaps out the old battery, its metal connecters now covered with dried up battery acid from years of not being changed. "Alright let's see now." He flips the switch to on again. He presses some buttons, and the phone beeps back in response. "Haha! Alright, now lets hook it up to your computer there." After a moment of hooking it up, the wifi indicator pops up on screen, indicating a somewhat solid connection.

"Hey, we're online now!" I exclaimed. I immediately open up the internet browser, which took an agonizingly long time to load up. I open up the first news website that I could find, and after a minute of loading, an image starts to load up on the front page with the words "Weather Report" listed at the top. I set the laptop down onto the coffee table so everyone could have a good view of the screen. As the image is about halfway loaded, we all fall silent at what we are seeing. It's just a map of the United States as shown by the weather channel. But as the image finishes loading, we see what can only be described as nonsense. On a typical weather map screen, storm formations will show up as bands of green laid on top of the map, with yellows and reds to indicate severity of weather. On this particular screen, the one that had the entire country laid out in front of us, was a perfectly rectangular green shape laid all the way across the country from one end to the other. Scattered across various parts of the country were strips of yellow and red, much like you'd expect when storms were active. But it still didn't make sense. This map was insinuating that there was one, hyper massive storm cloud sitting above the entire country, all at once.

"That can't be possible, can it?" Ron asked. "I'm no weatherman, but that's just one big storm cloud they're showing, right?"

"That's what it looks like to me." Adam said. "But where did it come from? There's no way weather forecasters didn't see this coming from miles away."

We continued to look at the screen for a little longer, before I remembered that we were on a timer here with my laptops battery life. "Let's try not to waste too much time, only got about half of the battery left on this thing. What else should we check?"

"Can I try logging into my Air Force portal website? I can try and reach out to my buddies and see if they know anything." Adam asked.

"Yeah man, go for it." I let him use the laptop. He logs into his account, and it brings him to some sort of secured messenger site. He quickly browses through, types a few messages to various people, but ultimately, no replies or answers.

"Nobody is responding. I don't think anyone is at the base anymore. What the hell happened over there? They couldn't have all vanished as well, right?" Adam looked over at me. "Unless...the same thing that happened at the Costco to you...happened to the military base as well." I hadn't thought about that yet today. An entire group of people, vanishing into thin air, except for one. Me. And in this case, Adam at his Air Force base. Except he was transported thousands of miles away from where he was. "Alright, lets conserve your laptops battery for now then." He hovers the mouse cursor to check the percentage of the battery. "45%. Decent amount." He says before handing the laptop back to me.

"Anyone else wanna check something before I shut it down?" I asked both Ron and Marco.

"I'm good here." Ron said

"Nah, think I'm good." Marco replied.

"Alright, shutting her down." I said as I closed up the laptop and slid it back into my backpack. "Well, what's next for you guys?"

Ron started first. "Well, I think I'm gonna hang out here for a while, don't really have a reason to leave if everywhere else is going through the same stuff."

Marco followed up. "I live close by, I was just freaked out by last night and figured it was safer to stay with other people. I'll head home in a bit."

I turned to look at Adam. "Adam? I know you're the furthest from home, but what's your plan?"

Adam thought for a moment, then spoke. "You said we're in Livermore, right? There's a small municipal airport somewhere across the freeway if I remember correctly. I might do some digging around over there and see what I can find."

Ron, in a sort of half serious, half humorous way, asked "You're not planning on stealing a Cessna, are you?"

Adam, smiled slightly. "No, I don't think so. They're probably not functioning either, like the cars on the freeway. But they'll likely have a radio or something I can get a hold of. Might be useful. From there, I'm not sure what I'm going to do."

"Alright then. Well best of luck to all of you then, stay safe out there." Ron said. "And feel free to come back around if you guys need a place to crash again. In the meantime, I'm going to keep sifting through my buddies boxes for whatever else could be useful."

I packed up my bag of snack foods into my backpack and got ready to head out for the long walk ahead of me. A part of me hoped that maybe I would come across a bicycle, if I was lucky.

The greater part of me hoped that I would make it home even at all.

Home.

Where I would get more answers.

End of Part III