The Sky Vault

Book 3: Comet Cycle

by Benjamin Percy

Genres: Literary Fiction; Alien Contact; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

The third and final book in Percy's innovative and acclaimed Comet Cycle, The Sky Vault follows the aftermath of an airplane that goes missing over Fairbanks, Alaska, in the wake of the comet, and a teenager's search for answers about his father's final moments aboard the flight.

The comet, Cain, came from beyond our solar system, its debris containing elements unknown. It brought a powerful new metal to the once-declining Midwest; alien fungus to the forests of the Pacific Northwest; and now, in the isolated region of Fairbanks, Alaska, the skies shift and stretch as an interstellar dust cloud seeds itself in the atmosphere. The National Weather Service dismisses the anomaly. Then, an hour outside of Fairbanks, a plane shudders its way through pulpy, swirling, bruise-shaped clouds, lit with sudden cracks of lightning. The sky opens. And the plane vanishes.

Theo Jenson is fifteen years old when his father inexplicably disappears along with the plane, and the month-long search for him ends with a funeral procession and the beginnings of acceptance. Despite the tragedy, Theo's popularity in school skyrockets, while his best friend Wheezy remains on the outskirts of any real social circle. Their friendship will be put to the test when other Fairbanks citizens begin to vanish, sucked up by a funnel cloud that extends like an elephant's trunk, and chased down by a mist that solidifies into the shape of a man.

Most comets, it's generally believed, are made of a combination of rock and ice. But the fact that so many of them blink out of existence - seen one day, gone the next - makes some scientists believe they are cored with something known as "mirror matter," another term for the dark matter we know exists in the universe because of its gravitational force. The effects of Cain's dark matter are still not entirely known, but its impact on Earth might be more treacherous, or sublime, than could ever be imagined.

(P) 2023 HarperCollins Publishers

Release date: September 12, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

Sometimes, when Chuck Bridges takes a long, hard look at his life, he feels like a time traveler who ended up in the wrong place, one of those alternative futures where things went haywire. He should have hair, for one. His hair had been glorious. Thick, inky curls that gave off a kind of light, like an oil puddle in a parking lot or something. Also: He should be a well-respected mayor or an important scientist guy or maybe the beloved host of one of those programs about UFOs and Bigfoot on the Discovery Channel. Also: He shouldn’t be in a cell.

He’d been arrested before—a New Year’s DUI, a fistfight at a county fair, a protest march in Anchorage—but not for years and not for anything serious. Not like this. Port Authority had been waiting at the end of the jet bridge, and as soon as the plane engines quieted to a whine, the flight attendant unlocked the cabin door, and the cops marched in.

They found Chuck in his twentieth-row seat, and when he said, “I don’t know what you’re looking at me for. I didn’t do nothing wrong,” they yanked him up and twisted his arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists. “You should be thanking me!” he said. “I was trying to save their lives! I’m a goddamn hero!” They escorted him up the jet bridge and along the concourse and through a locked door and down the stairs and into a hall that ended with a windowless cell in the basement of the Fairbanks International Airport.

He tries telling them the same thing he’s been telling everybody else. But they won’t listen.

It goes like this:

Cumulus. Cirrus. Altostratus. Nimbostratus. Clouds have names, right? But even though the sky is ever shifting, the cloud atlas doesn’t change. It’s more like the color wheel than the dictionary or star charts. The labels and order are firm. There is nothing more to discover.

Except that there is. Chuck believes he has identified a new formation. On six different occasions—six!—he has documented its existence. The photographs and videos on his cell are not comprehensive, in part because he really needs to order a new phone—the screen on this one is so cracked, it doesn’t function properly—and the weather events have been short-lived, dispersing after less than a minute.

“But you should see it,” he tells everyone. “It’s wild, man.” Its appearance in the clouds at first resembles a stormy sea, with sharp gray waves and pulpy black troughs—and then something shifts and tendrils lower, like those of a jellyfish. A puckered swirl forms at the center, what could be described as an eye or a mouth.

Then, just as quickly as it began, it dissipates. Briefly apocalyptic is how he describes it. He has sent his files and arguments to both the National Weather Service and the World Meteorological Organization, and they have dismissed him. Not once, but repeatedly. Because he won’t let up. Several scientists and meteorologists have blocked his phone number and e-mail and a few even filed for restraining orders against him because they are—in their words—“Exhausted by the insane ramblings of a hobbyist and conspiracist.”

Of course he takes offense. Not at the conspiracist jab—that’s fine. It’s the hobbyist label that bugs him. He is in fact a meteorologist for 93.3—the Grizz—the fifth-biggest FM market in north-central Alaska. Or maybe meteorologistisn’t his official title—he’s a classic rock disc jockey who also acts as the janitor for the station. But by God, he’s been reporting on the weather for more than twenty years—thirty-second updates every half hour—and that’s got to count for something.

What hair Chuck still has he grows long. His wiry beard matches it, running halfway down his chest. He’s long-limbed and bony except for a prominent belly that makes him look like he’s smuggling a basketball beneath the Hawaiian shirts he favors with his jeans and cowboy boots. He sometimes has at least three pairs of reading glasses on him—cheaters, he calls them—one perched on top of his head, another on the tip of his nose, another dangling from a cord around his neck, because he misplaces them so frequently.

And yes, it’s true that he has a blog—called The Truth Is Out There—that is responsible for inquiries into cloned celebrities, faked moon landings, microchipped vaccines, mind-control television programs, alien lizard people, Sasquatch, and the Bermuda Triangle of the North. But so what? So what! There’s nothing illegal about any of that.

The truth of the matter is this: He should get credit for discovering a new cloud system. But he won’t because he made the mistake of telling the NWS that something in the sky was trying to communicate with him. At least he thinks it’s in the sky.

The first time he noticed it—the whispering in his headphones when he cued up Zeppelin—he wondered if he was picking up another frequency. And then he got this feeling—this tingle-at-the-back-of-the-neck feeling—that made him tear off his headset and spin around in his chair to make sure he was alone in the studio. That’s when he saw it. Out the window. The darkening sky. The lowering shoots. The swirling nexus.

It happened again, and again, and again. Over the course of several years. Not on any regular schedule and not with any steady connection to the temperature or pressure system or moisture index. He recorded the whispers and played them for others, including his wife, but she only said, “Maybe it’s the wind?”

This was in their kitchen, where slices of Spam sizzled on a stovetop pan. “Maybe it’s the wind!” he said with a mean laugh. “That’s what the stupid people say in horror movies before they get killed!”

She shut off the burner, and the meat continued to spit and pop. She crossed her arms and gave him a hard stare. “So I’m stupid, am I?”

“No!” he said, realizing his mistake, stepping back. “No! That’s not what I meant.”

Her name was Janey and she kept her hair and her nails cut short to avoid the fuss. She worked at the credit union as a teller and could butcher a deer in less than an hour and didn’t like much in the way of nonsense outside of the sitcoms she watched at night to relax. She had a way of inclining her head, like a boxer lining up a shot, that usually tipped him off to the fact a big fight might be coming. She was doing precisely that now when she said, “Then what did you mean?”

“I meant . . . I’m frustrated is all. I feel like something’s happening, something important, but I’m the only one who believes it.” He walked over to the kitchen table and flopped down in a chair and put his head in his hands. “I’m sorry.”

She found the spatula and scraped the Spam slices off the pan and onto a plate. She laid a paper towel over them to soak up the grease. Then she walked over to Chuck and rubbed his back and told him it was all right. But she was worried about him.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? You always think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t always think you’re crazy. I think some of your ideas are a little out there.”

“This is different. This isn’t some theory about Jack Parsons and the Jet Propulsion Lab. Or Area 51. Or the hodag or Mothman or any of that.”

“How is it different?”

“Because I saw it! I heard it! There’s no distance or speculation. This is raw data. A firsthand account.”

She said, “I think you should listen to the recording again.”

“Fine. Let’s do that.” He set his phone on the table and called up the recording and hit the Play button and they both leaned in. It was as if one of his ears heard it as a whispering urgent voice, and the other heard it as a scratchy recording of the wind. “Maybe I should play it for Theo when he gets home.”

“You should not play it for Theo.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s fourteen and he already thinks we’re aliens and spends all his time with his friends. There’s no reason to give him another excuse to roll his eyes.”

He squeezed the phone in his palm and stared at his ghostly reflection in the black screen. “The whispering is one thing. But how do you explain the clouds?”

“Well, the TV signal doesn’t come through as sharp when the weather gets rough. I’m guessing the same can be said for radio.”

“I’ve been working at that station for how long? And there’s been some enormous weather. Some serious howlers. But I never noticed this—never—until we put up that omnimetal antenna.”

“What are you suggesting?”

He stood up from his chair and went over to the window. This was September and the lawn was yellow weeds. “I don’t know.”

“Well, until you do, maybe you should just take things down a notch.”

But he couldn’t. He sent off more e-mails and made more phone calls. He brought it up at his favorite bar—the Broken Mirror—and ended up getting a bowl of peanut shells dumped over his head. He brought it up on the air during his morning shift and ended up in trouble with the station owner. “The world is a strange enough place right now, don’t you think? People don’t need another reason to be scared, and they sure as shit don’t need an excuse to turn the dial to another station. Give them the news, the weather, and a few laughs. Then shut the hell up and let the rock and roll take over.”

Chuck had become a regular on several Reddit boards and Facebook groups devoted to weather, and it was here that he learned about an upcoming meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The conference would take place at the Red Lion Inn in Portland, Oregon. There were several research meteorologists who would be presenting on subjects like predictive algorithms, atmospheric geophysics, NOAA leadership, and apps like RadarScope. But there was one thing in particular that caught his eye. A scientist named Dr. David Hyuck who taught at the University of Florida and had written a book called Synoptic Analysis was lecturing on the increase in extreme weather since the meteor strikes. Not just droughts and flash floods and hurricanes and tornadoes and blizzards but peculiar phenomena, like a rainstorm of blood in central Texas and a thunderstorm that lasted for ten weeks in Carbondale, Illinois.

Chuck had reached out to him before. Many times before. In fact, Hyuck was one of several scientists who had filed a restraining order against him. Which made no sense. It’s not like Chuck was jerking off on his lawn or threatening his dog or something. So what if he’d found Hyuck’s unlisted address by making a few calls to the Gainesville DMV? So what if he’d gotten hold of his private cell number by tricking the department secretary at the university? Chuck just wanted to talk. If the two of them could meet in person, things would be different. He was certain of it.

So he booked a flight to Portland. He polished his cowboy boots and wore a corduroy jacket over his Hawaiian shirt and even trimmed his nose and ear hair. Because he was going to make a good impression. But upon arriving at the hotel, he discovered that the conference was taking place in an annex that he couldn’t access without registering. To get through security, he needed a name tag, which he could easily acquire if he was agreeable to paying the two-hundred-dollar same-day fee. But he was not agreeable. He had just blown a month of grocery money on the flight down here. He didn’t see the need to register for the same reason he hadn’t seen the need to book a room. He didn’t want to attend any of the panels and lectures. He just wanted to speak to Dr. Hyuck. All he needed was an hour. His flight home was later that afternoon. He would be in and out, so if they could point him in the right direction?

It didn’t take long for things to escalate. Chuck had a habit of speaking loudly—it was part of being a DJ—and sometimes people mistook this for yelling. The security guards gathered around him, asking him to please lower his voice, and as they were guiding him away from the annex, he broke free and made a mad dash past registration.

His feet pounded as he negotiated the maze of carpeted hallways looking for ballroom 1A, where he knew Dr. Hyuck would soon be taking the podium. He could hear the guards huffing and yelling, “Stop!” He knocked over a ficus tree, thinking that might slow them down. He dared a look back, and it was then that a catering cart rolled out of a conference room. He ran into it with a crash. Plates shattered. Coffee urns overturned. Linen napkins fluttered like doves, and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon bulleted the wall.

He tried to scramble up and keep running, but the guards had caught up to him. They weren’t so accommodating this time; one jammed a knee into his back and threatened him with a Taser when he screamed, “Dr. Hyuck! Dr. Hyuck!”

A few men in tweed blazers gathered to watch as he was dragged away.

Three hours later, he was back at the PDX airport. He wasn’t about to pay the fee for a flight change, and the cops promised not to charge him if he just got the hell out of their jurisdiction. He had broken his glasses and torn his jacket and lost four hundred and thirty-five dollars to Delta for nothing. So he decided he might as well get drunk.

Six tiny bottles of vodka and six hours later, he was on a plane roaring past the white fang of Denali and over the forested nowhere of central Alaska. He couldn’t concentrate on reading or watching a movie. If he had worn a tie, he would have loosened it. He could feel the worry creases in his forehead aching from too much use. His tongue felt numb and his chest was slippery and warm. His window shade was open, but his eyes were unfocused, so the world unscrolling beneath the jet blurred.

He had lied to his family. He had told them he had an important meeting scheduled. Said scientists had finally agreed to review his findings. They wanted answers as much as he did and would likely name the new weather formation after him. The Chuck didn’t really work, but Bridges sure did. The Bridges Paradox. Yes, it was pretty much a done deal. Maybe he’d even end up on the front page of the newspaper. It didn’t feel like a lie, because he honestly believed it would happen.

Janey had always supported him. He had a tendency to get really passionate about something and then lose all interest and conviction. When he’d liquidated their assets into silver. When he’d signed up for courses at the U in economics, Mandarin, astrophysics, figure drawing, and creative writing, then dropped out of all of them halfway through the semester. When he’d bought books on coding and the equipment to build his own computer. When he’d rented a backhoe and dug a hole in their yard and begun construction on an apocalypse bunker he planned to pack with canned goods, propane tanks, water jugs. But lately she had grown more impatient with him and he knew that he was facing a week of stony silences and banishment to the couch. He deserved it. He was a big, dumb idiot. He was a—

He didn’t know how to articulate it, but whenever the clouds gathered and the whispers issued from his headphones at the radio station, he felt . . . something. Something electric that couldn’t be captured through audio or video. Like his nervous system was expanding outward from his body and wiring its sensors into the very air. This same sensation bothered him now.

He tried to stand up but his seat belt caught him. He twisted one way, then another, as if there were somewhere to go. Then he stilled and cocked his head and cupped a hand to his ear. Because he heard it—maybe spitting and hissing from the overhead speakers—a voice. The words too soft and ephemeral to catch.

“Do you hear that?” he said to no one in particular.

The man beside him had meaty thighs and wide knees that jammed into the seat in front of him. He wore an eye mask and a neck pillow, and he was snoring softly with his mouth open. Chuck reached for him to give a little nudge, but the whispers rose in volume and urgency and made him unclip his seat belt and spin around. A few curious and annoyed gazes flitted toward him, but most everyone else seemed to be lost in a book or a screen.

He ducked down as a chime sounded over his head. The seat-belt alert. The pilot’s grainy, boxy voice followed, asking passengers take their seats and make sure their belts were fastened because there was a storm system up ahead that had the potential to cause some severe chop.

He slumped back into his seat, buckled his seat belt. His heart thudded in his chest. He must have simply heard some interference in the comm before the pilot’s voice sounded—that was all. A flight attendant hurried by and he motioned to her. “One more?” he said and held up his plastic cup, a single ice cube rattling on its bottom.

“Sorry,” she said. “We’re supposed to buckle in, and we’re not too far from our descent anyway. Enjoy that last sip.”

He tipped back his head and knocked the cup against his mouth until the ice cube came loose. The medicinal residue of vodka was soaked into it. He leaned his head against the cool glass of his window and scrunched shut his eyes. A couple minutes of sleep would be a nice escape. A narcotic blackness.

The first rumble of turbulence hit the plane. A few nervous laughs sounded after the flight stabilized. Then a hard jolt made several people cry out and grab their armrests. The fuselage groaned and quaked. A baby wailed.

The sun was an hour from setting and the light outside was hazy, so it took Chuck a moment to feel certain of what he saw. “No,” he said. “No!” The plane was shuddering its way into pulpy, swirling, bruise-shaped clouds lit with sudden cracks of lightning that made it appear as if the sky were opening up.

The pilot’s voice came through the intercom again, but it was interrupted and unclear this time. “Don’t,” he seemed to say. “Look.”

“Don’t,” Chuck said. “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”

The man next to him tore off his eye mask and studied him blearily. “What’s your problem, buddy?”

The air suddenly tasted like hot cardboard. Chuck twisted the valve above him, trying for a fresh blast of oxygen, but his lungs felt like they couldn’t fully fill. He closed the window shade and immediately opened it again.

Because there were shapes in the clouds. They were not like the giraffes or alligators a child might imagine in a puff of white. They were tentacles coiling and oozing throughout the black thunderheads. Here was a giant eye in a flickering ball of lightning. Here was a gaping mouth, miles wide, its breath powerful enough to make the plane tremble.

“Don’t you see,” Chuck said, tapping at the window with his finger.

He didn’t wait for a response. He unclipped his belt and climbed over the man beside him and raced up the aisle. He tripped over a foot. An elbow knocked his thigh. He lurched into a seat, got up again. “We’re going to die if you don’t get us out of this system!” Chuck said when he finally arrived at the cockpit door. He pounded at it with his fists. “Do you hear me! We’re all going to die!”

It was then that the cabin lights went dark. The plane banked hard before settling into a steady shuddering line. Everyone’s cell phone lit up, and a scratchy static like the popping of an old vinyl record started to play from all of them. And the whispers began.

That’s more or less what he tells the Port Authority cops in the interrogation room at the Fairbanks International Airport. There are two of them: a big Alaska Native guy with sleeve tats, a ponytail, and acne-scarred cheeks, and a short woman who chews gum like she hates it and has the kind of red hair that comes from a bottle. It is puffed up on top and clipped short along the ears and runs to her shoulders in back. His name is Ted-O and her name is Diane. They keep their arms crossed and their eyebrows raised.

“I just honestly don’t know why you’re treating me like a criminal. I told you before, I didn’t do nothing wrong. In fact, I literally probably saved the lives of everyone on board that plane.”

“Saved their lives, huh?” the red-haired one says.

“Yes.”

When Diane speaks, he can smell the puff of mint from several feet away. “How exactly did that work?”

“The pilot changed his course. He listened to me. And here we are.”

“Here we are, all right,” Ted-O says. “You done?”

“I guess.”

“Ain’t you gonna ask for a lawyer or something?”

“Would I have to pay him?”

“Lawyers are rich, right? Reason for that.”

“I was a prelaw major for a few months,” Chuck says. “I think I’m perfectly capable of representing myself.”

Diane pulls the gum from her mouth and sticks it to the underside of the table. “Do you know that flight-crew interference can come with a fine of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and twenty years in prison?”

“Then,” Ted-O says, “there’s fines the FAA can hit you with.”

“Plus you’re probably going to be banned from Delta.”

“My advice?” Ted-O says. “You plead temporary insanity.” He poses the question to his partner: “Don’t you think? Insanity? Temporary?”

“Temporary?” she says. “He’s still acting crazy. When does the temporary end?”

“I’m not crazy,” Chuck says.

“Said every crazy person ever.”

“Flight-crew interference.” Chuck straightens up and combs his beard with his fingers. “Is that what I’m being charged with?”

The Port Authority cops shrug their shoulders as one. “Up to the feds, man,” Ted-O says.