nevaeH and the Nephilim

Oh, man. I didn’t want to do this over the phone. When is your return flight?” Nevaeh holds the phone away preparing for his reponse. “Six to eight weeks.” Ralf groaned. “No, no that won’t work. Where are you going? I’ll come to you.” She broke out into loud laughter. “Uh…unless you’re going to fly or float to the bottom of the earth, you won’t be seeing me for a while.” “What?” Ralf exclaimed. “You’re going to Antarctica?” “Yep. Wild, huh? I don’t know whether to be excited or terrified.” “Wow, that’s a serious twist I didn’t anticipate. What I have to share can’t wait that long. I have the most amazing information for you—something that will change everything!” Nevaeh sat up in her seat. “This can’t be about you and Sierra reconciling. I would have already heard from Cloe. This must be about the missing time, right?” “You are absolutely right. I only have a few minutes, though. First, I have to know how your former bodyguard is doing.” “Not so great, I’m afraid. She’s taken a leave of absence. Colonel Stevens told my dad she wasn’t the same. I’m carrying a terrible guilt load because of it.” “That makes sense,” he said bluntly. “What? Are you talking about my guilt ? Wait, I know you don’t like her—” “No,” Ralf replied. “You’ve got it all wrong. It has nothing to do with how I feel about her. It has everything to do with how it fits.” “Ralf the Riddler,” Nevaeh said, dismissing him. “Are you being snarky?” “Probably,” she said as she yawned once more. “I’m not much of a morning person.” She slid back into her seat. “Ok, well, let me preface things by saying my source is rock solid. A team of engineers has analyzed and re-analyzed the data, and you can be completely confident in my findings.” “Findings?” “The forty missing hours. I know what happened to them.” Nevaeh swallowed. “I’m not sure I want to hear this, but go ahead.” “Let me quickly walk you through the events so it makes sense,” Ralf began. “The day I met you and Brenda, as fate would have it, we were swapping out wide area locators on hospital equipment. When we decommission a unit, these locators are removed and reassigned to another piece of equipment. The locators are small and can be in your pocket and virtually unnoticeable. I had one in my leg pocket when we were in upstate on the hunt for your bone digging friend. That’s how I came about this amazing information. Can you believe it?” “Believe what, exactly? It early and I’m not following you, Ralf.” “The WAL manufacturer spent weeks on this, and that’s why I’m just able to tell you.” “I’m starting to feel sick. Maybe I don’t want to know.” Nevaeh looked up to see if anyone was boarding yet. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you over the phone. And you’re going away for two months. This is bad timing for you, but it will clear me of suspicion with Sierra. It’ll clear you too.” “Enough of the techno lingo, just tell me where the missing time went?” “Ok, hear me out. I have the printout in front of me. We go to the farmhouse, we circle around behind it, we stop at a rock outcropping, we move down the hill and we are there for three hours.” “Wait a minute,” she said. “Location services on our cell phones showed nothing,” “Great observation. I don’t think our cellphones ever left the farm—or maybe they were wiped. The WALs have a secondary means of triangulation, so even if they can’t receive real-time GPS, they can store location data and transmit when a signal is detected.” He paused and said, “Brace yourself. This gets extreme. At 14:23 hours or two twenty-three p.m., the three of us were near the New York=Pennsylvania state line. Ten minutes later, the WAL pings a tower outside Cuzco, Peru. Can you fathom that? Only an aircraft traveling at hypersonic speed could have covered thousands of miles in ten minutes! Twenty-seven minutes later, it pings on a tower on the southern outskirts of Garupa, Paraguay. Almost precisely forty hours later, the data points show what I just described in reverse order. Is this coming together for you?” Confounded by Ralf’s account, Nevaeh hones in on the one thing that matters most to her: “Tell me where we spent forty hours!” “I don’t know where we were held all that time,” he replied. “Wait. Hold on,” Nevaeh said. “All this and you don’t even know where we were?” “How can you not see this?” Ralf said, his voice breaking. “The WAL was in my leg pocket the whole time. It pinged those towers in South America when it landed and shut off the magnetic field that gives them anti-gravity propulsion.” Nevaeh shot up from her seat and stepped behind an electronic sign board advertising freshly brewed coffee. She lowered her voice and held the phone tightly to her face: “Are you telling me that something took us, snatched us up and held us in its lair?” “Nevaeh, try not to be confrontational, ok? I knew it would be hard for you to take this.” “You are crazy. I am not ready for this idiotic explanation.” Nevaeh saw some people seated nearby crane their necks when she raised her voice. She pressed the phone to her mouth. “And no one I know is either.”