by Peter Clines
Hector stepped up onto Road Warrior’s lift gate and paused. He looked back and forth up the street. “What is that? Is that... flies?”
Lynne cocked her head to the side. “It’s not flies. Bees, maybe, or hornets?”
“It’s not insects,” said St. George with a shake of his head. “Too steady. It almost sounds like...”
He rocketed thirty feet into the air. “Grab the flare gun!” he shouted down at them. “Red flare, fast!”
Jarvis fumbled in his pack. “What the hell is it?”
“No way,” said Lady Bee. Her eyes were wide and she smiled as the droning sound grew louder. “No way!”
“It’s a plane!” shouted St. George, going higher into the sky.
Chapter 4 - Signing Up
THEN
If your parents gave you a name like Augustus Phillip Hancock, you’d’ve joined the Army, too. Trust me. When I turned eighteen, I wanted to be anywhere but Little Rock, so when Eddie said he was going to sign up I did, too.
Now, I ain’t supposed to tell anyone about this. When I got pulled into Project Krypton last year, still a fuzzy right out of boot camp, they had us sign a bunch of waivers and security paperwork. Nobody with wives or kids. Nobody who was an only child. Then they shipped us off to Yuma, which I can say is dead center in the middle of nowhere. A woman from Broadsword company said she’d heard the whole project used to be based at Natick, like you’d expect, but it’d gotten so big they had to set up a whole sub-base out at Yuma for it. One of the fellas said the little base should be called Kandor, and two or three fellas thought that was really funny, but I didn’t get the joke.
One of the fellas in Broadsword also said all the paperwork we’d filled out was the same stuff they use for suicide missions, but I think that’s bullshit. Although, looking back at it, maybe it ain’t.
I was one of the lucky ones. Turns out my company, Greyhound, was the control group. We were eating sugar pills and getting shots of saline water. Apparently they can just stick that in you and it doesn’t do much of anything.
So, yeah, Greyhound was lucky. Angel and Devil companies, too. Well, kind of. They’re all getting dialysis or something for a few weeks. They weren’t getting sugar pills and saline.
Broadsword are the fellas that got screwed. Their company had the biggest concentration of the stuff the old doc was giving us. It didn’t go over well. I’ve heard them talking about all the stuff Angel and Devil are getting, plus marrow transplants and hormone therapy and stuff. None of them are complaining though. We all know what happened to Lucas and Jacobs, and ain’t nobody wants to go through that.
Well, none of us know officially. But we were all there for the start of it and Eddie works in the medical wing. He saw how they ended up. So we all know.
At first it seemed great. All of Broadsword company was bulking up, getting stronger, just like the old doc wanted. Then they all started getting cramps. And they were... swelling. You know those fellas who get crazy ripped? The ones who hit the gym every day and do contests and stuff? It was like that. Their arms and legs were getting bigger and stretching their skin so it was creepy tight and their veins stood out. And they weren’t even working out much.
It hit Jacobs first. He just got itchy. He tried to be a good soldier, suck it up and not let it get to him, but it kept getting worse. After two days his eyes were watering. Not crying, just watering bad.
Third day we told him he had to go see the doc. He was pissed at us and kept saying no and to mind our own beeswax. Yeah, he’s one of those southern weirdoes who says beeswax. But First Sergeant Paine had been specific about reporting any symptoms and I wasn’t going to disobey the First Sergeant. Finally Jacobs got up off his bunk, went to grab his shirt, and when he reached up his arm split open. There was a pop and his skin broke open like a hot dog popping on the grill. There was just too much muscle packed in there. It didn’t even bleed much because it was pulled so tight.
We got him down to the infirmary and Lucas came along, too, ‘cause he’d started to feel itchy and now he was worried the same thing was gonna happen to him. The docs were cutting him out of his wifebeater and it turned out his skin had split, too, right across the shoulders. They started calling for the old doc after that and we all got hustled out. But Eddie was still there. We heard it all from him later.
Apparently the old doc’s serum didn’t work like he hoped. Remember how I talked about the crazy ripped fellas? You ever see them when they’re so big they can’t put their arms down? I think that’s what they mean by muscle-bound. Well, that’s what was happening to Lucas and Jacobs. Their muscles were growing out of control. Four days after we took them down there, Eddie told us they couldn’t even move anymore. Their arms and legs were just big sausages of muscle. They looked fat because their abs were getting so big, and they couldn’t lay flat because their glutes and shoulders were twisting their backs up. And their skin was still splitting. It couldn’t grow as fast as the muscles were, so they were getting some kind of sharkskin grafts or something.
On the fifth day they started screaming. We heard it all over the base. Turns out their bones were growing, too, but they weren’t growing fast enough, either. They kept getting crushed between muscles or stretched apart as the muscles kept getting bigger and thicker. “It’s like their bodies’ve turned into torture racks,” Eddie said one night when he got back to the barracks. “They’re being pulled apart by their own muscles.”
They screamed for three days straight. Eddie told me over chow they’d gotten so big it took huge doses of painkillers just to make them stop screaming. The whole thing was freaking him out. He’d snuck his phone in and showed me a picture of this swollen red thing that looked like a fat grub. He said it was Jacobs, and that his skull’d been pushed off his neck by all the muscles, but he was still alive cause it hadn’t actually broken his spinal cord yet. “If they can fix him,” Eddie said, “he’s still gonna be a cripple for the rest of his life.”
On day nine they stopped screaming. All at once. On day ten we were told Jacobs and Lucas had died in the line of duty. They’d be given full honors. And the old doc was gone. Eddie said he’d heard Colonel Shelly and the higher brass were furious, and the doc had pretty much fled from the base.
Anyway, we all figured that was it for Project Krypton. Three-fourths of us out of commission one way or the other. One company left. We got three days to wonder about it and then we met the new doc at a big briefing. There was this young fella with him in a dark suit, Smith from Homeland, and he smiled a lot and gave this little speech and introduced us all to Doctor Sorensen.
The new doc’s the flipside of the old doc. The old doc was actually a young fella, not much older than any of us. He was some hot-shot scientist, and kind of an asshole, to be honest. The new doc’s an older fella who feels like he should be a cool uncle or something. He’s got a big gray beard and glasses and he talks like a teacher.
They were redoing Krypton from the ground up. Nothing was going to be the same but the name. It was going to be a whole new process. That made a lot of people rumble. But Sorensen stopped that real quick before Colonel Shelly could bark at us.
“These are not going to be experiments,” he told us. “I will not be putting any of you brave men and women at risk. These are all established procedures, using tested drugs and chemicals. With some of you the treatments will take and with some they will not. But there will be no risk of... of what happened before I got here.”
Then the First Sergeant got up. He told us we’d done our duty and everyone here had carried out the requirements we’d signed up for. Even though they were keeping the number, as far as the Army was concerned this was going to be something new and the 456th was being disbanded. If we wanted out, we’d be debriefed and reassigned. We had until tomorrow morning to decide. He dismissed us.
The young fella, Smith, started working the crowd. He was shaking hands, asking questions, kissing asses. He shook mine and asked if I was going to
stick around and I told him, yeah, I probably was. I said probably but I think even then I knew I was going to be part of Project Krypton for the long haul. It just felt like I belonged there.
I moved to the front of the room and realized a few fellas from Greyhound were behind me. I think we’d all been ready to get a new assignment. Yuma was boring as hell, and we’d all joined up to go overseas and kick some Al-Qaeda ass. If Smith hadn’t said anything, I think we all would’ve walked out of the room and started packing. Now it was almost a pride thing to finish what we started.
Colonel Shelly was having a talk up front with the new doc. If it was anyone else, I’d say an argument, but I knew the colonel didn’t do arguments. Or excuses.
First Sergeant Paine was there. He locked eyes with me and I knew enough to stop where I was and stand at attention. I heard the fellas lock up behind me, too. A couple people call him First Sergeant Bring-the-Paine, but not if he’s anywhere nearby. So we stood there for a few minutes while they talked and didn’t do anything except listen.
“You can’t just throw him out,” the new doc was saying. “He was in the Broadsword trials for four months.”
“And now he’s out of them, Doctor,” Colonel Shelly said, “just like everyone else.”
“It’s not that simple. The drugs and artificial hormones that idiot was filling them with are all through his system. They’re stored up in his fat cells waiting for him to have a flashback.”
“You said he was clean. You also said if they never had any reaction during the testing, odds are they never would.”
“In theory yes, but there’s always going to be residual traces in his kidneys, his skin, his fat cells. His tests said he was clean but like anyone with a history of drug use, weight loss could cause a flashback and then it’s all back in his system again.”
“Well, hypothetically, what’s the worst that can happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Sorensen. “I’m still not sure what caused the reaction in Jacobs and Lucas. There’s a dozen possible triggers. Stress. Adrenaline. A disease that strains his system. Potentially, any of it could cause spurts of muscle and bone growth.”
“And what are the odds?”
“It could happen, isn’t that enough?”
“Could it?” said Colonel Shelly. “Could it really?”
“The chances are slim I admit, but—”
“Slim is fine by me. He’s insubordinate, he struck an officer, and he’s out. He can go home and the LAPD can deal with him. If he has a reaction, it’ll kill him and then no one has to deal with him.” The colonel turned and walked away.
The new doc shook his head and followed him. “I still think it’s a mistake,” he said as he walked away.
“Specialist,” First Sergeant Paine said. He was giving me that look. “What’s your purpose here?”
“First Sergeant,” I said, still at attention, “I request to keep this duty assignment.”
Chapter 5
NOW
St. George pushed down against gravity and launched himself higher into the sky. He was a good three hundred feet above the Hollywood Freeway now. He spun in the air as he tried to spot the source of the low drone echoing across the valley. The chattering of thousands of teeth had almost hidden the sound. If Los Angeles hadn’t been a ghost town, they never would’ve heard it.
A line of fire shot past him and burst into a red star trailing crimson smoke. Between the flare and the sun, looking west was tough now, but he was pretty sure a prop-engine plane wouldn’t be coming in from the Pacific. He could still hear the faint sound, but he thought it was getting fainter.
There was another flash, this time white light, and the air crackled and danced on his skin as the sonic boom ruffled his hair and clothes. Zzzap floated next to him in the sky.
Can you hear that?!
“Yeah,” said St. George. “Can you spot it? Radar or engine heat or anything?”
Zzzap spun around once. Right there, he said. Looks like it’s following 101. It’s transmitting a tight signal back thataway.
Zzzap pointed to the east.
“What’s it saying?”
The wraith tilted his head as if listening. It was one of a dozen habits he kept when he was in his energy form. Doesn’t sound like talking, he said. I think it’s a video feed. And I’m pretty sure this is military encryption.
“Yeah?”
I saw a lot of it during the outbreak. Looks like the same kind of patterns. It’s confusing at first, but once you get used to it it’s like reading a ransom note, one of those ones where all the letters are cut out of different magazines.
“Can we catch up with it and signal the pilot?”
Zzzap nodded. Shouldn’t be too hard. He’s only moving about eighty-five, ninety miles an hour and he’s heading right at us. Been ignoring my signals, though.
The two heroes flew higher into the sky. Zzzap moved in short hops so St. George could keep up. Five minutes later they were a thousand feet up. The air was crisp even though the sun was harsh. The gleaming wraith pointed at their target. It was a few hundred yards away and closing. They fell in next to it as it passed and kept a dozen yards between them.
The plane was about thirty feet long, if St. George judged it right, with maybe a fifty foot wingspan. It was hard to tell with nothing to compare it to. The shape of it reminded him of a dragonfly, heavier in the front with a slimmer body. A basketball-sized blister peppered with lenses hung below the dragonfly’s “head” and the tail was two large vanes pointing down at rakish angles instead of up. The propeller was mounted behind the tail. He sailed above the aircraft and looked down at the phallic front. There was no cockpit.
Zzzap flitted up to the plane. He hung in the air alongside the craft and pointed to the blue and white star crest on the slim body. Told you it was military.
“What the hell is it?” St. George had to shout over the propeller and slid a few more yards away from it.
Zzzap followed him over. Seriously? Didn’t you ever watch the Learning Channel or Discovery or any of those?
“I dumped cable two years before I became a superhero. Too expensive.”
So you never even saw the special they did about me?
“Barry!”
I’m pretty sure it’s a Predator drone.
St. George looked at the plane roaring alongside them. “The robot planes they used in Iraq?”
Yeah. And it’s not so much a robot as remote controlled. Which means somebody east of here is flying this thing.
“And watching us,” said the hero. He pointed at the lenses on the metal basketball. “They can see us through those, right?”
Technically, yeah, but I’ve been jamming its transmissions since we got close to it. We don’t know who’s on the other end of this thing.
St. George glanced at his friend. “What makes you say that?”
The wraith pointed east. I can see their transmitter over there. It’s about four hundred miles away. Danielle could probably back me up on this, but I don’t think the military controls Predators by straight radio anymore. It’s all done by satellite to increase range.
“You’re assuming whoever’s driving this thing still has access to a satellite.”
The glowing figure shrugged.
St. George felt himself dropping behind the drone and pushed himself faster. “You think there’s a chance it’s just on automatic or something?”
Zzzap shook his head.Nah. Somebody launched this thing.
“You think the military’s looking for us?”
Took them long enough, if they are. But, yeah, if someone sent one of these things to Los Angeles they’re looking for something.
They sailed along with the Predator for a few more miles. St. George glanced down. He could see an airport and a big park below him, which meant they were over Van Nuys at this point.
The plane began to make a slow turn towards the south. New search orders coming in, said Zzzap. The wraith circled the drone a
few times, so fast the aircraft could’ve been hovering in the air. What do you want to do?
“I’m thinking,” he said. “This should be a no-brainer, but... I don’t know. After all this time, to have this thing show up out of nowhere just feels weird.”
With good reason, said Zzzap. Pretty much every zombie movie ever made tells us that anyone who’s part of the U.S. Armed Forces must be insane by now. They probably want to kill our men and take our women. And when I say take, I mean—
“You’re not helping.”
Sorry, said Zzzap. Whoops. Definitely being controlled. Someone’s finally noticed they’ve lost the feed from this baby. They’re sending a couple reboot protocols.
“You letting them through?”
Yeah, why not? Doesn’t do any harm and we’ve still got a couple more minutes before they realize they’re being actively blocked.
They flew on for another mile. St. George twisted in the air and looked behind them. “They’ve seen the Mount already, haven’t they? And the Big Wall?”
Zzzap looked back as well. Probably, yeah. Might not realize we’re all live people yet, though.
“Can you send them a message? Override their signal and send a cautious ‘hello’ or something?”
The wraith nodded. Piece of cake. Anything in particular?
“Make sure they know we’re here, but be a little vague about who ‘we’ are.”
Zzzap soared above the drone for a few moments and then bent his head close to it. Ahhh, he said. Yeah, I think I’ve got something that’ll work.
“What are you sending?”
What you asked for.
“You’re doing something stupid, aren’t you?”
He held up a white-hot hand. Don’t distract me. I’ve got to have this in my head just right or it won’t transmit properly.
“Barry...”
Trust me, George, said the wraith. If we’re going to re-establish contact with the world, we want it to be memorable. Like that. He raised his head and flitted away from the plane.