“I think we just went through a platoon’s worth of ordnance,” whooped Butler as he flattened the cardboard boxes to make them all fit back in the trailer bed.
“We’re not done yet,” replied Repeth. “Unhitch that thing. Everyone takes a turn at driving the Beast. Lockerbie, you are now the instructor. Get teaching.”
Lockerbie nodded. “All right. Donovan, take the driver’s seat first. I know, it’s tight for a big guy like you. Now, three and six on the wheel. It’s an automatic transmission so don’t worry about shifting. Reach over there for the starter…”
Sundown came early as clouds rolled in from the west, thunderheads rumbling in a distant overture across the Shenandoah Mountains’ Skyline Drive. Rain squalls hit just as they pulled up to headquarters, becoming a cloudburst, and then settled down to a steady drizzle. Temperatures fell into the forties Fahrenheit and stayed there.
As they got out, Repeth dismissed them. “Everyone go get a good eight hours sleep. Reveille’s at 0415. I got a couple cooks getting up just to give us hot chow so meet at 0430 at the mess.”
-4-
Rick immediately noticed something out of place. Instead of three guards with Pancho leading them it sounded like four outside his door. With little else to do as he lay in his bunk, he had gotten very good at discerning among the little sounds of the prison. As his door opened he found out he was right. Pancho and two of his men were there but also a fourth, a short mixed-race woman in a starched lab coat.
From her blocky comfortable shoes to her tightly pinned hair she seemed all business. Rick immediately nicknamed her “Frau Blucher.” He watched her as she stepped into the cell and looked around like a horse-buyer examining a stall.
Sniffing disdainfully, she walked over to where he sat. Reaching out to twine her fingers into his hair, she abruptly and painfully pulled it backward, grabbing his throat with the other.
He froze, aware that he was helpless with the three toughs watching; besides, he wasn’t worried about permanent damage. There was no such thing since the Eden Plague.
Roughly the woman palpated his throat, then pulled his lower eyelid down, staring into his ocular cavity. Removing a penlight from her pocket she shone it up his nose, then into his pupils, then his ears. Lastly she opened his mouth and examined his teeth, tongue and throat. Not a word was spoken as she released him and turned on her heel to stump out. Pancho shrugged and might have smiled sympathetically as he caught Rick’s eye before closing and locking the door.
It was a strange and clinical violation, and clearly did not bode well. He hoped it was some kind of twisted health and wellness exam for prisoners, such as a concentration camp doctor might have performed, uncaring but not specifically cruel. Still it shook him, and he realized that although he was a prisoner here, things could still get a lot worse. In some ways it just had; fear of the unknown was a cruelty of its own.
It took longer than usual to go to sleep that night, but exhaustion eventually overtook him. Sometime in the dark he awoke briefly to a faint hissing sound and the smell of pine, but dismissed it and rolled over. If they want to gas me and kill me, what can I do?
But the next day there seemed little amiss, other than an itch in one eye. He rubbed at it and thought no more about it as he performed his morning routine, which consisted of toilet, a short shower, brushing his teeth and a shave. The brassy mirror in the bathroom showed nothing in his eye that he could see, though the reflection was always blurry. He supposed they were afraid he would break a glass mirror and use the shards to hurt himself or others, so they gave him a shiny piece of metal bolted to the wall.
Sitting down on his bunk to put his slippers on, he noticed they were switched the wrong way round, left on right, right on left. That seemed odd; he always took them off as a pair and set them down the same way he would wear them. Perhaps they had used a sleep gas in the night so they could come in and search his room. There was nothing to find anyway, and he wondered why they wouldn’t just do it with his full knowledge. Or perhaps they had installed or serviced the surveillance devices he was certain were there. But then again, they could do that during the day when he was at his “job.” It puzzled him, and he shrugged unconsciously.
Today went by as every other; he wasn’t even sure of the days of the week, and his minders took one in six rotating days off, in which case they were spelled by temporaries. He did his work in the quad room, and waited for his latest chance to slip something past the three others.
When Bennie next went to the toilet and he saw the color of flesh from Stan’s screen, he knew Marvin would be dozing – that’s why Stan thought he could get away with his girlie fix – and Rick quickly inserted the last bit of code into his latest trapdoor. Now all he had to do was press a certain sequence of keys and the system would crash for a few minutes, erasing the logic bomb in the process. He had no idea what he would use it for but he was trying to prepare for any opportunity.
Booted feet scraped in the corridor and he blanked his screen just as the door burst open. Pancho filled the entrance with a grim and disapproving look on his face. “Mister Johnstone, please come with us.” He crooked a finger, a gesture that would have been comical if it was not so frightening.
Rick stood up unsteadily, wondering if they had seen what he was doing, hoping it was just coincidence. He submitted to handcuffs and shuffled in front of the two other jackbooted thugs as they marched down the corridor, shoving him from time to time. Pancho was never cruel, but his men had no such compunctions.
They took him into a section of the complex he had never entered and put him in a cell. Little different from his own, still it felt colder and more forbidding, a place of fearful waiting instead of scant refuge. He saw gouges and chips in the wall, hash marks of days, and a few scratched words. Bugger. Please God Help Me. Kilroy Was Here. I Pray For Death. This last one chilled him, and he wondered what had been done to the writer to make him scribble his despair for all to see.
With nothing better to do he dozed on the thin stained mattress. There was no linen or pillow, and the pallet smelled of dust and sweat and urine. This even felt like a different area, a section of the prison whose spirit reeked of fear and misery. He rubbed at his itching eye.
Again came the sounds of the boots, but these were not Pancho’s and his relatively professional crew. This group of guards, though dressed the same, moved differently. They jerked and twitched; one man’s eyes looked in different directions, like a lizard’s. The leader of the detail had a forehead made of highly polished metal, like medieval armor, and there was something about the length of his legs that just seemed…wrong.
This mob did not march him away; they carried him bodily down the corridor and he finally began to struggle. He couldn’t help it as the fear mounted in him, the terror that he was finally going to find out more about this place than he wanted to know.
A thin screaming appeared from somewhere, and it took a moment before he realized it was his own throat making the sound. He clamped down on it and told himself, whatever they do to me, I can survive and recover from it. The Eden Plague will regenerate my body, as long as I make it through. Death is the only thing that’s irreversible.
But he was wrong.
-5-
The Beast crossed the line of departure at 0500 EST. “Can’t see a damn thing in this rain, Top,” complained Lockerbie. “You sure you don’t want to wait until it’s a little lighter?”
Repeth tapped her right temple. “Forget your squadcomm already? Drop your HUD, synch it with the Beast’s night vision sensors in overlay mode.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said in embarrassment. A moment later she said delightedly, “This is shit-hot! It’s like a video game!” The Beast accelerated to fifty up the twisting country road. To the passengers it appeared as if she was driving blind. Grusky held on for dear life; Repeth jounced and swayed, nonchalant. Butler cinched his harness tighter in the turret above, and Donovan rolled his head to the side and began to snore.
“Oh, Top, I forgot to ask,” Lockerbie said over the comm, “where are we going? Other than, well, north up this road?”
“Access the navigation computer. It’s already programmed in.”
“Okay…got it. Huh. We’re going to a pollution control plant?”
“That’s what it used to be.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s the only lead I have.”
Road rolled away under rubber for many minutes before Grusky cleared his throat and switched the squadcomm to a private channel. “Top, you know, we’ll work better if we know a little more about what’s going on.”
The answer came back late, but eventually Repeth responded. “Yes, you’re right.” She switched to the general channel. “Okay, listen up. Lock, pull over somewhere safe-ish, we’re not in any huge hurry. Butler, stay sharp, use your infrared HUD link. Donovan...Grusky, wake Donovan up, will you?”
Once everyone was on the squadcomm she briefed them. “Okay, here’s the deal. The Charlottesville folks’ link-analysis connects our friend Professor Scott Stone with a group called the Shadow Men, or just Shadows. During the Unionist period the conspiracy nuts on the internet claimed they were a secret organization employing kidnap and death squads to disappear the Unionists’ political enemies, a kind of Gestapo. DOD intel organizations were forbidden from investigating these rumors, and were instead instructed to turn over all information to the FBI, who were tasked with tracking down – wait for it – not the Shadows, but the conspiracy nuts.”
“Huh,” mused Grusky. “They wouldn’t waste time stamping out wacko lies, only truth.”
“Right you are. Once the nukes broke the Unionists’ hold on the Federal government, Army ground-intel started collating reports and information, but it’s pretty sketchy right now. They have connected these Shadows with lots of dirty deeds, but what caught my eye were the reports that a lot of the disappeared people were hackers and computer wiz kids, cyberneticists, roboticists…sound familiar?”
“Wasn’t Mr. Johnstone a computer scientist?” asked Butler.
“Yes. Actually he was a cyber-warrior, a network attack and defense expert,” responded Repeth. “He was instrumental in the Free Communities’ defense against the cyber assaults of the Big Three during the New Cold War,” she said proudly. “He never picked up a gun until he was embedded with us, but he was probably more important to the Free Communities military than a hundred spec ops people like me.” She swallowed a lump in her throat.
And it’s my fault he’s gone. I should have said no and made it stick. If I had, he’d be angry, but he’d be safely back in South Africa or Colombia or somewhere like that, helping his spymaster mother fight the cold grey battles of the intelligence world, not slaving away handcuffed to a desk or…she refused to speculate further.
“Anyway, they have reason to believe the Shadows took over part of the Cole pollution control plant in Lorton, just south of Fort Belvoir, as their main base of operations, a couple of years before Plaguefall.
Before nuclear firefall, you mean, don’t you Jill?
She clubbed her guilt sulking back into its box and went on. “The plant is big, it has lots of places to site an experimental laboratory, and it’s easy to conceal from the general public. They expect to see people going in and out every day, what do they know about pollution control? It would have been easy to get rid of bodies, too.” She blew air out her cheeks. “So it’s thin, but that poor schizoid from Fredburg said the Professor sold Rick to the Shadow Men, and he talked about “burn rooms.” Who knows what that means? But if the Shadows needed high-end tech people back then, and if any of their organization survived to need people like Rick, then some answers might be there at that plant.”
The team mulled that over for a minute or two. Then Grusky said, “Okay. I’ve chased felons down on thinner leads. Let’s do it.”
Lockerbie put the Beast back in gear and they drove northward into the waning drizzle.
***
Repeth flipped up her HUD glasses and put the binoculars to her eyes. The Beast was sitting in the parking lot of the strip mall across the six-lane expanse of US-1 from the entrance to the plant. She couldn’t see much; dead trees screened the industrial facility, and so did an eight-foot high cyclone fence with vision-impeding strips woven into it.
The stretch of asphalt around them teemed with the remnants of buildings and burned-out vehicles, flash-ignited by the nukes that had hit Fort Belvoir and Davison Army Airfield two or three miles away. Hues were muted in the drizzle but even in bright autumn sunlight it would have been a dreary scene, devoid of color. Almost everything green had turned brown, and rivers of black concrete-like ash had petrified in waves and miniature dunes.
She wondered why Commander Alkina or her secret Psycho masters had programmed Belvoir in as a nuke target. It was home to a lot of administrative and agency headquarters, and the enormous hospital that had subsumed Walter Reed when it closed, but nothing vital to the US military effort. Just a bunch of drones in endless office cubicles, pushing electronic paper from one place to another and getting in each other’s way.
As far as you know, that is. Who knows what the Unionists had hidden there? We’ll never find out now. It’s just a smoking hole.
“Donovan, check the IdentiFinder, will you?”
He pulled out their handheld radiation detector and analyzer. “Looks well within limits for Edens, Top,” he responded in his Appalachian drawl.
“Should we go right in the front door or look for another entrance?” asked Grusky.
“I think the front door is it. What do you see there at the gate?” She meant the space between the fence and the shattered guardhouse, since there actually was no barrier anymore.
“Umm…nothing?”
“Right you are. It doesn’t look like it’s been used much or often in the last couple of months. I’m betting that if anyone is still at the plant, they have another, more discreet way in and out. US-1 is a main public route, and you will notice it’s navigable. We haven’t seen any traffic but even in this rain I can see where some people have pushed cars out of the way, and some places where the crud has been rolled through, making a driving lane. People may have survived in the hollows of the hills around here; they must be salvaging from the grocery and shops.” Repeth jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the strip mall behind them.
Grusky nodded acquiescence. “So if I was a Shadow I’d not make it obvious that the plant was in use, so as not to draw attention. Or maybe,” he stroked his chin, “there’s really no one there.”
“Only one way to find out. Lock and load.”
“Guess I'm Lock,” joked Lockerbie to Butler at the gun, “and you're Load.”
Grusky didn't laugh but instead looked askance at Repeth. “We’re kicking in the front door?”
She swiveled her head around to stare at him with dead eyes. “You got a problem with that?”
He blinked. “None whatsoever. Just want to be clear on the plan, boss. No recon means we go in blind. Doesn’t seem your style.”
Repeth gritted her teeth. What the hell do you know about my style? “It also means we go in with maximum surprise. The plan is shock and awe. Butler, use whatever kind of shells you need to cut our way in. We may end up driving the Beast straight into a building to start the extract.” She reached down between her knees and hefted a rotary grenade launcher, loading it with baseball-sized shells.
“You think Rick is in there?”
“I’m hoping. And if not, they’ll damn well tell us where he is.”
“Understood.” When Repeth faced back to the front, Grusky exchanged glances with Donovan, who shrugged.
“Let’s go.”
The Beast roared through the front entrance to the Noman M. Cole Jr. Pollution Control Plant and almost immediately faced a choice. “Right or left?” yelled Lockerbie over the squadcomm.
“Right,” ordered Repeth, choosing the smaller of the roads, “and you don’t
have to yell with these things.”
“Right, right,” she acknowledged, and turned right. They raced past shattered buildings with fried vehicles melted in place in the parking lots. The nukes’ EMP had immobilized them, then the thermal radiation had ignited almost everything that would burn. Atmospheric shockwave had blown some of the fires out, fed others.
It was an ugly mess.
Behind the buildings they could see rusting industrial machinery on a grand scale – holding tanks, square ponds, and enormous pipes linking cinderblock buildings. “Pollution control” in this case meant waste water treatment, decontaminating sewage until it was clean enough to be poured into the Potomac.
“Stay on the edge of the complex, keep it on our left,” barked Repeth. “Grusky, Butler, Lockerbie, you’re on the left, look for any signs of occupation – operational vehicles, or fresh tire tracks. Donovan, keep watch on the right along the treeline. Lock, slow down at each of these little roads, I want to see if anyone has used them since Plaguefall.”
They rumbled along counterclockwise, circling the huge installation generally leftward. The multibarrel nose of the Vixen quested for a target but Butler could see nothing to shoot. His left hand rested on the selector lever that chose his ammo – Needleshock, Armorshock, penetrators. Right now he had the latter feeding the gun. He ignored the disturbing thought of what they would do to a human being and focused on scanning his forward arc.
“Turn right,” called Repeth at the next fork. This sent them rumbling off through a thin screen of dead trees, away from the waste treatment plant. Once on the other side they could see an enormous elongated cement structure, more pipes leading across its roof and into its walls, some stabbing downward into the ground.
“Over there, left, take that left,” Grusky called, his voice rising, and Lockerbie complied. The Beast careened leftward, down a gravel road closely shadowed by scrubby trees. “Look ahead. Those are tracks. This road has been used recently.”
The Orion Plague Page 3