by Nick Pollota
Bright light bobbed in the sky as fully mobile sister gunships traveled low and steady along the outer perimeters of the barricade. Whew. On both sides of the roadway, the trees and weedy bushes were filled with the glittering strings of concertina wire. Miles of it. Nearby was a flatbed trailer truck half-filled with the plastic boxes the deadly stuff came packed in and drums of the chemical compound used to dissolve the wire. Not ecologically sound, but neat and fast.
George gave a whistle. “They've got enough concertina to encircle the whole damn plant."
“Twice,” Kathi added, her face pressed against the Armorlite glass.
“It didn't help,” Jessica said in a small voice.
Just then a squirrel scampered out of the bushes and entered the clear band of burned-off grass. A guard shouted, others turned, and the arboreal rodent was hit with machine guns and grenades, and then the deafening roar of an Atchinson rapid-fire machine shotgun vomited a storm of lead and steel. As the smoke cleared, a team of soldiers in silvery, full-body, Chemical Warfare suits moved in to cleanse the area with flamethrowers.
I heartily approved. The official orders were that nothing goes in, or out, without proper authorization. I was pleased to see that the troops were being so literal in their compliance.
At our approach, a heavy middle-aged man turned from the group of bedraggled soldiers examining a M-16 with a barrel bent like a pretzel. The general was a big man, completely filling the green-black combat uniform of the 157th Illinois Regulars. The brim of his web-covered helmet was mathematically straight, shoes mirror-polished, and pants sharply creased, but at his belt holster instead of the standard Colt .45 automatic was a mammoth blue-steel .50 Desert Eagle. A nasty weapon suitable for killing rogue Buicks and assorted small buildings.
The two-star general glowered at us. I glowered back, and he started limping over.
I glanced at Jess.
Broken leg, she sent. He tackled a werewolf barehanded to hold it in place so one of the Abrams could shoot the beast.
Much as ex-PFC George Renault disliked brass, he positively shone at the officer in admiration. No wonder he was in charge. Briefly, I wondered if the general believed in magic. The Bureau could use a man like that.
“Did it work?” Raul asked curiously, leaning forward in his plush contoured seat. The motion made his shoes list starboard, and the tiny crew started bailing to stay afloat.
“No."
Oh crap. “FBI,” I stated doffing my commission booklet and flashing badge. Dutifully, the rest of my team tried their very best to appear tough, alert, and wary. The quintessential description of every federal operative in existence.
I let him have a good look at the badge and photo ID card. A bit dusty, it was my real badge. Edwardo Alvarez, FBI, Justice Department, sub-division Bureau 13. It wasn't often we got to announce the fact in public.
My badge glowed brightly as he held it, informing him that I was the real article and informing me that he was ditto.
In the distance, I could see the Commonwealth Edison power plant and faintly heard the crackle of small arms fire. It was infuriating to just sit here, but without proper ID, these troops would do their best to blow us into atoms. The perimeter guards were going nowhere.
After a moment, the general snorted his disdain and pushed away the proffered booklet. “Trust me, with that suit, you don't need a badge."
What? Oh yeah. I was still wearing my FBI-clone clothes. A real plainclothes federal agent was as close to invisible as science alone could make them.
“What happened here?” I asked, sliding my commission booklet into a breast pocket so that the badge was on open display.
“Don't waste time dicking around with us!” he roared. “Get in there and frag those geeks!"
Startled, I stomped on the gas pedal and the limo lurched ahead. This time nobody moved an inch to accommodate us and I had to skillfully maneuver around the military obstructions until we reached clear road.
I almost pressed the supercharge button, but stayed my hand. The road beyond was blown to pieces. Blast craters made the pavement resemble a flat colander. I was impressed. Unable to move beyond their appointed position, the Army had blasted the Scion every inch of the way as they fled.
How nice to deal with professionals.
The stout limo jounced through endless craters until we reached an eight-foot-tall triple-wire fence surrounding the place. Actually, it was three fences laid atop each other. The outer two were plastic-coated, while the middle carried enough voltage to achieve the Tesla effect, if necessary. And yet punched through that formidable barrier, the resilient gate, and concrete guardhouse, was a hole big enough to herd elephants through.
Rolling into the breach, we skirted around a flatbed truck loaded with concrete pylons. A crude but effective battering ram. Damn their efficiency!
Beyond was a chained dog run. Scattered inside were the remains of what might have once been German shepherds. As there was no time, or place, to go around, I accelerated the limo and tried to ignore the meaty bumps we rolled over. Mike said a brief prayer as we passed. Jessica looked as if she was going to be ill.
There still remained one defense for the nuclear reactor. I hope it worked.
Straight ahead was a three-story brick building. Offices. To the north was the two-hundred-foot-tall fluted ceramic structure of the cooling tower. It was what people saw wafting into the sky as they hastily drove past a nuke powerplant. Geez, it was only warm water vapors, about as harmful as a daydream. To the south was an encased area filled with power transformers directly connected to an array of metal skeleton towers, the high-voltage transmission lines which feed electricity into town.
In the midst of this stone and steel grandeur, dominating the landscape, sat a huge smooth concrete dome. The emergency containment vessel. Resembling an inverted granite soup bowl, it completely covered the main reactor building so that in case of a core meltdown, a cloud of radioactive steam couldn't escape.
What about Chernobyl?
The communist government had tried to save money on the plant and didn't bother to erect a containment vessel.
Bad move.
Yowsa.
Cars from the parking lot had been parked in a circle around the plant. The limo smashed the little things aside as easily as the Scion werewolves had climbed over them. Beyond lay a collection of broken sawhorses that had once offered a meager defiance against the adamantine beasts. But no human corpses, as there wasn't a living soul in the whole complex. Had the Scion noticed?
The front doors had been locked, and the handles linked together with plastic shipping straps, tough as leather. The plastic had been snapped like taffy and the doors completely ripped free from the thick alloy casing frames. Could even a werewolf do that?
So far our watches had remained silent. I pressed the test switch and was satisfied that the Geiger function was working. But if these babies start clicking, well, even magic can only heal so much. What the hey, I had a lot of friends waiting for me in Heaven, and most of my enemies were in Hell.
Gingerly, we stepped through the shattered windows, wary of the jagged glass daggers ringing them. Inside, the whole lobby was blackened by fire, and charred lumps of meat marked where a few of the Scion had died from land mines hidden under the plush carpet. Turnabout was fair play.
Three hallways branched out from the lobby, but one was blocked with office furniture stacked in a crude barricade. There was a map on the wall behind the receptionist's desk, but I knew from experience that it would be subtly wrong. The security in these places was tight as our own. Even so, it had been beaten.
“Diversion?” Raul asked, jerking a thumb.
Moving silent as a dream, Mindy was already at the hallway, prodding the furniture scraps with her sword. “Yep, the reactor is this way."
A lumpy shape blotted the floor in shadow.
“Twelve o'clock high!” I cried, firing a Magnum at the overhead lights.
In a spr
ay of broken tiles, a huge creature dropped from the ceiling to bounce off the receptionist's desk and land on a decorative glass table. The top instantly shattered beneath the impact of the heavy being, slashing its scaled legs to ribbons. Ha! I always knew those things were dangerous.
Wait a minute, a scaled werewolf? It was a gargoyle!
As the snarling beast struggled to free itself from the ruin of the table, the seven of us formed a firing line with our backs to the wall, not the open mouth of the tunnel. Jessica's machine pistol sprayed a deadly combo of lead, steel, and the new plasma rounds at the animated stone monster. Annoyed, the beast hissed its defiance and vomited a stream of acid-based enzymes. A golden ray from Raul's wand diverted the stream in midair. The poison hit a computer terminal, which began dissolving. An arrow from Mindy bounced off the gargoyle's eye. Donaher hosed the beast with liquid fire. Kathi gestured, and shackles covered its mouth.
With a fiendish grin, George snicked off the safety of his Masterson Assault Cannon and started pounding the gargoyle with armor-piercing HE rounds. Slammed into the plastic mock-up of the nuclear furnace, the gargoyle was held motionless under the furious onslaught of caseless HE. A perfect target.
Holstering my .357 Magnum, I leveled the Barret, took aim and squeezed the trigger.
At first, I thought the rifle had jammed and exploded on me. Mentally, I braced myself for the pain of the searing shrapnel tearing me to bloody gobbets. Then I realized the gargoyle had no head.
“Nice shot,” George complemented.
“Thanks,” I said loudly to hear my own words. My hair hurt from the concussion of the rifle, and my ears were numb. Did this thing actually fire a bullet, or did the noise level simply smack things to death?
“Now that,” Raul panted breathlessly, pointing to the motionless statue on the floor, “is no werewolf!"
“Faith, lad, we called in friends,” Father Donaher said, adjusting the sizzling pre-burner on his weapon. “Apparently, so did they."
“But why?"
Sourly, George tapped his rifle. “What kind of ammo we carrying?"
“Silver,” I answered, and the light bulb clicked on. “Which will do nothing special to a vampire, ogre, or medusa!” Our other ammo was miles away at the Sears Tower. Bloody marvelous.
Levering in a fresh round, I then shouldered the massive Barret. “That was just a guard. Come on, I'm on point. Raul on rear. One meter spread. Let's go!"
Hurriedly, we started down the central hallway, Then a siren outside began to wail loud enough to rattle the broken window. We did not need Jessica, our universal translator, to decode its dire message.
“Meltdown,” Mindy breathed.
And we smiled.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Yes!” I cried, raising a clenched fist in victory.
Jessica and Mike shook hands. George and Raul did a high five. Mindy hugged Kathi to the evident surprise of the big Russian actress. Even her butterfly did a little jig.
“Let's go get ‘em!” George shouted brandishing his M-60/banjo.
Scrambling more than running, we hurried along the central hallway. This was our big chance. Destroying the nuclear powerplant was such an obvious ploy that precautions had been taken. Every city which possessed a nuke also had a full-scale working model of the plant in which to train new personnel. It was an exact duplicate, with the proper pipes hot or cold, live steam in the turbines, and a floor that vibrated. Completely draining the magic from a fully charged mage, the Bureau had switched the two buildings. The real powerplant had been rendered invisible and was a hundred feet to the west. This was the model. Perfect bait to finally capture a werewolf.
But if the Scion deduced the truth and managed to find the operating plant, Chicago could very quickly get blowtorched off the face of the Earth. A sobering thought. The fake alarms never stopped or slowed.
Turning a corner, we faced a set of double-doors with a gaping hole in their middle, closing off the hallway. The team paused when Mindy spotted a tripwire, and George deactivated the Claymore mine attached. Just a gift from the Scion.
Beyond those doors lay another set, and then more. Finally, we reached a more formidable portal. The door was a seamless slab of highly polished alloy. There was no lock, handle, window, keypad, keyhole, card slot, sensor pad, or dial. And lying on the floor was a very dead human technician. Jessica faced a corner and vomited.
In the wrong place at the wrong time, the poor man had been brutally killed. I took off my FBI jacket and draped it over as much of him as possible.
“Damn beasties must be on the other side of this wee door,” Father Donaher reasoned, radiating Irish anger hotter than his flamethrower.
“Okay, how do we get past this?” George demanded, panting slightly from our brisk run.
“Nobody does,” I said, shifting the cushioned strap of the Barret rifle. “Obviously, the whole plant has undergone primary lock-down!"
“Which means?” Mindy demanded, poised on her toes with her sword in both hands, ready for action.
I thumped the armored portal. “Meaning that nobody gets in until the President personally commands the Atomic Energy Commission to send the step-down code."
“But this is only the model."
“Which functions exactly as the original!"
Donaher whipped out his pocket cellular phone.
Reaching out a pale hand, Jessica closed the phone. “We'd never reach the White House quickly enough."
Separated from capturing our enemies by only a meter of reactive metal alloy. It was infuriating!
In an unprecedented move, George spat the gum out of his mouth. “Okay, the front door is locked. How about a side window? Or we could do the old Santa Claus bit with a chimney flue."
"Nyet," Kathi said in a ghostly voice, her eyes glazed. A wizard's inner sight is often a wonderful thing at times. This was one of them. “Scion did not pass door."
“Eh?"
“What?"
Impulsively, I glanced around. “Then where are they?"
“Ohmigod,” Jessica breathed, staring at the floor.
Although most of the dead man was covered with my darkening suit jacket, the mangled remains of his arms and legs were horribly apparent. I did a double-take when I saw what my wife had noticed. Wholly intact, his undamaged left arm was fully outstretched, with a single finger pointing to the west. Towards the real plant. Yikes! Not murdered, but tortured!
George took Raul by the shoulder, “Horta, get us out of here!"
With a furious expression, the mage stomped his staff upon the floor. Nothing happened, except that the body was gone and the meltdown alarm was strangely quiet.
“This is the real power plant!” Father Donaher gasped in understanding.
Proudly, Raul kissed his wand. “Wizard's got to see where they teleport and what could be better than a full scale model?"
“How nice,” I acknowledged hastily. “Mindy, carve that door to pieces!"
“No need,” she said pointing upward. “Look."
We craned our necks. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling above us, continuing for several levels. Beyond that, even with maximum augmentation from my sunglasses I saw nothing.
“They did a bypass,” Katrina breathed in admiration.
Brushing back his wild crop of red-hair, Father Mike raised an eyebrow. “The defenses of the main control center were too great?"
Pulling the bolt on her Uzi machine pistol, Jessica scoffed. “No way. But if anybody tries to force entry, the whole plant shuts off with overrides. Then the Scion could never get the meltdown they want."
“But out here?” Kathi asked confused. “What can werewolves do outside reactor?"
Yeah, what could the Scion do out here? Any computer commands from the office building had to be routed through the main control booth and would be easily deleted by the technicians. No important equipment was external of the containment shell. And without computer guidance, the only place a meltdown could be fo
rced was the main reactor. No, in the main reactor.
“Merciful heaven, they're headed straight for the core!” Father Donaher cried, almost dropping his shotgun. “Going in from above!"
“Brilliant!” I reluctantly agreed.
Craning his neck, George was croggled. “Through the containment shell? It's ten meters thick!"
But the ploy made sense. They would encounter no real security devices or defenses on the outside of the building. There was only thirty meters plus of ferro-concrete to pierce, and they were home free.
Faintly, in the distance, I heard another explosion from the perimeter. Just another rabbit, or the Scion trying to escape after finishing the sabotage? Suddenly, a soft horn began bleating. The actual meltdown alert? Hoo boy.
Crouching low, Mindy jumped and pulled herself onto the next level. “Come on!” her voice cried. “It's an easy climb!"
Yeah, right.
Gesturing and chanting, Katrina tapped our miscellaneous footwear with her wand and we each raised a leg and carefully placed a shoe on the wall. With a lurch, the team lifted the other foot and now stood on the curving dome, our bodies perpendicular to the ground. In standard attack formation we raced the three stories to the roof. Flying would have been faster, but this was a magic minimum mission. How many additional battles would we have to fight tonight?
Stretching endlessly above us was the containment vessel. A quarter million tons of formed, pre-stressed concrete reinforced with every artifice available to modern science. Spiraling around the dome was a series of dots, bare bolts indicating where the access ramp leading to the top had originally been, but removed for this emergency.
But high off to the side was a dark unidentifiable splotch. Sky to my left, rooftop to my right, we scampered forward. If the military was watching us through binoculars, somebody was asking for aspirins right about now.
The splotch was a hole. Keeping well clear of the opening, we gathered around the breach in the concrete. The passage was roughly six feet in diameter, neat and round as if done by a giant shoemaker's awl. It was a disquieting, if picturesque, visual.