by Peter Clines
“Not a lot going on out here?”
“Oh, there’s lots to do,” said Freedom. “The proving ground is the largest military test facility in the world. We’ve barely reclaimed a third of the sub-bases and stations here. Even discovered two no one knew were out here. But it does get a little…”
“Monotonous?”
He grinned. “I think that would be the word, sir.” He raised his huge hands and flexed them into fists. “Doctor Sorensen’s enhancements feel like a waste when we don’t get the chance to do anything with them.”
“Yeah,” said St. George. “I know that feeling.”
They walked for a few more yards. The white brick buildings gave way to a series of more industrial-looking structures. St. George caught a glimpse of the distant fence line between two and saw sentries plodding back and forth.
“Would you mind if I asked a question, sir?”
“I guess that depends.”
Freedom had his fingers laced behind his back again. His eyes dropped below St. George’s chin. “What’s with the tooth? I noticed it in Los Angeles.”
He glanced down at his lapel. “Oh, that.” He ran his finger along the length of ivory. “Believe it or not, that’s a demon fang.”
“Come again?
“A fang. From a demon. Honest.”
The corner of Freedom’s mouth twitched. “Pardon my language, sir, but bullcrap.”
“Hey, I don’t blame you. If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t’ve believed it, either.” St. George pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing a line of ragged scars. “That’s where it bit me. The tooth broke off in my arm.”
The captain stopped walking. “Are you serious?”
“You ever hear of a hero called Cairax?”
“The monster man? Yes.”
“Demon man, not monster.”
“I thought Cairax was a hero.”
He stopped walking and looked up at the officer. “Are you a religious man, captain?”
“Why do you ask, sir?”
“Because I’ve tried talking about Cairax with a few religious people and it doesn’t always go well. We can leave it at ‘monster’ if you like.”
“I’m comfortable with my faith, sir.”
“Okay,” said St. George with a nod. “Max, the guy inside the demon, was a sorcerer. An honest-to-God, Harry Potter-sorcerer. As he explained it to me, he trapped the demon with a special medallion he made. Or in the medallion.” The hero shrugged. “I wasn’t clear on that part. Anyway, sometimes demons possess people and make them do evil things. He figured out a way to possess a demon and force it to do good things.”
They started walking again while Freedom mulled over the facts. “He died near the end of the outbreak, didn’t he, sir?”
“Yeah, he did. But we all know dying doesn’t mean what it used to. His ex was part of the group that attacked the Mount last fall. Which is how I got this.” He tapped the five-inch fang again.
“So he was…what, a zombie demon?”
“Yeah. Sounds silly, I know.”
“You beat him?”
St. George shrugged. “I cheated a bit, but yeah.”
“And the medallion, sir? What happened to that?”
He studied Freedom’s face. It was a firm face, but an honest one. “Destroyed,” said St. George. “I crushed it myself. The demon’s gone for good. So’s Max.”
The captain nodded. “Let’s hope so.”
The hero looked at him again.
“As you said, sir, dying doesn’t mean what it used to. Your friends are in here.”
They’d reached an oversized garage. Or maybe a small hangar. St. George held out his hand again. “Thanks for the escort.”
“Of course, sir. I believe the colonel arranged dinner with Doctor Morris and Stealth at twenty-thirty hours. I’m sure you’re invited as well.”
He batted some dust from the sleeve of his flight jacket. “I don’t think I’m dinner-ready.”
Freedom smiled. “Good thing you’ve got a new coat then, sir,” he said. “Wash up, shake the dust out, you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks, again.”
“One other thing. Your friends have some news for you. We agreed it’s best they tell you, but I hope you’ll see where we were coming from.”
“Okay,” said St. George. He looked at the honest face again. “That doesn’t sound too ominous at all.”
* * *
St. George hefted the three hundred-pound array of armored plates. “And you say they’ve got over a thousand of these…what, ex-soldiers?”
“At least,” Danielle said from inside the half-disassembled armor. “I did a sweep before we came back inside. Four other buildings in this section of the base have the same overpowered cooling units, and I saw two more near the far side. At a hundred and fifty per building…” She turned her head back to him and raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of exes on this side of the fence.”
He set the back section of the armor down on the work platform, nestling it into the foam cradle. “And this Nest thing makes them docile?”
“It activates enough of their brain to dominate the core behaviors which manifest, yes,” said Stealth. “Or so Sorensen claims.” She was sketching out circuit diagrams.
“If he’s lying he did a great job convincing the exes to fake it for him,” said Danielle.
St. George drifted into the air behind the armor and hooked his arms under Danielle’s shoulders. He lifted her out of the battlesuit and floated down to the ground. She shook out her legs and arms and took a few unsteady steps.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was only in there a few hours. Barely had time to adjust.” She hobbled across the workshop in her bodysuit, each step more confident, and grabbed a thick power cable. She leaned into it, dragged it back with her, and plugged it into a hidden socket above the armor’s hip. “This is going to suck without Barry here. No quick recharges.”
“Another point for you to consider,” said Stealth. She didn’t look up from her notepad.
“Where are your pistols?”
The cloaked woman shifted her head inside her hood. St. George was looking at her. He pointed at the empty holsters.
“They were seized upon our arrival,” she said. “Standard military protocol for civilian guests, and by their definitions we are civilians.”
“It doesn’t bother you? Being unarmed?”
“It does not. Why do you ask?”
“I ask because I would’ve expected not having them to drive you into a rampage.”
She turned her attention back to her sketch. “Colonel Shelly asked for them to be returned to me. I am satisfied.”
He looked at Danielle. The redhead glanced up from the armored helmet and shrugged. St. George returned the shrug and nodded at the cable. “Where are they getting their power?”
“A large solar farm, three miles to the north-north-west,” said Stealth. She pointed her left hand without looking up from the diagram. “It was visible during our approach in the Black Hawk. No doubt an Armed Forces renewable resource project. I would estimate it provides the base with six to seven times the electricity of our own solar resources.”
“For less than a thousand people,” said St. George. “Not bad.”
“But twice the equipment and resources, at least,” said Danielle. She ran a second cable from the battlesuit’s helmet to her laptop. “It’s not bad, but not good. Definitely not great.” A third cable ran out from the laptop to the armored spine on the back section of the torso. The redhead’s fingers danced across the laptop’s keyboard.
St. George peered over Stealth’s shoulder. “Almost done?”
“I believe so,” she said.
“You did all that from memory?”
“Of course.”
“That’s kind of amazing.”
“Thank you, George.” The cloaked woman set the diagram in front of Danielle.
The redhead stopped typ
ing. “Did you just thank him?”
Stealth straightened up. “Yes. What of it?”
“What’s going on with you? You’ve never thanked me for anything.”
“You have never paid me a compliment.”
“Oh. Yeah, fair enough.” She shrugged and traced the circuit patterns with her eyes. “Like I said before, it’s pretty simple. Just a monitored power source for the organic components.”
“From the slight variations in the two we saw,” said Stealth, “I would reason the Nest units are individually assembled.”
“Makes sense,” said Danielle. “They’ve got raw materials and tools, but not much in the way of actual manufacturing facilities.”
St. George glanced at the diagram. “So what’s bugging you two about this? Isn’t this a good thing?”
“Perhaps,” said the cloaked woman. “However, Cerberus and I were both struck by how simple this technology appears to be.”
“Is that bad?”
“Maybe,” said Danielle. “It’s not like these things do miracles, but they’re right on that edge of being too simple. I’m not skeptical it works because, well…” She jerked her head at the door and the Tombs across the road. “…it does. It’s just hard to believe something so small could do so much. I mean, have you ever seen anything brain-related in a hospital that didn’t need its own cart, at least? Usually its own room?”
Her laptop sang a few bars of Wagner at her. She muttered to herself and slid her fingertip back and forth across the mousepad.
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Is there a problem?”
Danielle shook her head. “The sensors got a little sluggish after I picked up that jeep. The response time was just off enough that I could feel the lag, but the diagnostics are coming up clean.”
St. George glanced at the legs and half-torso standing on the other side of the work platform. “Do you want to keep working on it?”
“No,” she said, “I want to get some food. Let’s go to this dinner. Might as well thank our saviors and enjoy our first meal as U.S. citizens in ages.” She grabbed her jeans and pulled them up over the Lycra bodysuit.
“Aren’t you going to be hot like that?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Were you wearing it under your clothes when you left this morning?”
“George,” she said, “focus.” She buttoned the pants and reached for her shirt. “You know, I just figured out what bugged me about all those exes.”
“What was that?”
“Well, it’s just…” Danielle stopped buttoning and flapped the edges of her shirt. “They were all wearing fatigues, right?”
“That is standard for military personnel under these conditions,” said Stealth.
“Yeah, that’s my point. Did you find it kind of creepy that every single one of them is wearing an Army uniform?”
“They probably dressed them like that,” said St. George. “Y’know, to make them look…well, uniform.”
Danielle adjusted her collar. “Are you sure?”
“Sure of what?”
“That they got dressed like that after they were bitten?”
* * *
Barry woke up with a splitting headache. Which, he supposed, was better than waking up with his face in a plate of scrambled eggs. And they’d been crap powdered eggs, now that he thought about it. He’d just been so excited about the bacon he hadn’t noticed.
Definitely better than not waking up at all.
Wherever he was, the curved ceiling was concrete with steel plates. Some fluorescent lights glared down at him from recessed sockets. One had a flickering tube.
He sat up and shook the last bit of blurriness from his eyes. He was on a simple wooden cot with a passable mattress and fresh white sheets. Military corners, he noticed. He was still wearing the pants and t-shirt they’d given him outside. There was no sign of the coat. Or the wheelchair.
“Bastards,” he muttered.
He let his mind settle, focused, and reached the trigger with no problem. He held off using it for now. Good enough to know he could reach it if he needed it.
The room was a huge dome, over a hundred feet across and a little over half that high. It was all concrete. In front of him was a long window, curved to match the wall. The room on the other side was dark. Way off to his left was a massive door that looked like a bank vault. The wrong side of a bank vault.
It was familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.
He grabbed his legs and swung them off the cot. Getting off the flimsy bed was a challenge, but he managed to do it without tipping it or himself onto the floor. He paused for a quick breather and looked around again.
Part of the concrete, a large circle around the cot, was fresh and clean. The other stuff was older. He saw a few clusters of rust-colored spots where bolts had been cut off and ground flat against the floor. There’d been something here in the center that had been taken out, and new concrete poured to make a flat floor.
Just as he realized where he was, the lights flickered on in the other room.
“Oh, sure,” he called out. “Wait until I’m down on the floor. Real classy.”
Three men and a woman walked into the room from a door he couldn’t see. The first man and the woman were in Army uniforms. He couldn’t make out any ranks or names from where he sat. He didn’t recognize either of them.
The third man was Sorensen, followed by Smith.
Sorensen issued a few orders Barry couldn’t hear, then leaned forward to a microphone. “Good evening, Mister Burke,” he said. His tinny voice echoed out of speakers hidden around the window. “I hope you slept well.”
There was a long pause and Barry realized the doctor was waiting for an answer. “Great,” he said. “Like a baby.”
“Wonderful. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Doctor Emil Sorensen. We met at breakfast. I believe you already know Agent Smith from Homeland Security. I want to assure you you’re somewhere safe.”
“Well, thank God for that,” said Barry. “Last thing I remember some nutcase had drugged my food.”
“I apologize for that. The duty sergeant thought a taser would be better, but I was afraid a surge of electricity in your nervous system would trigger the change.”
“Yeah, and we wouldn’t want that.”
“Precisely,” said the older man with a nod.
“I was being ironic.”
“Actually, you were being facetious,” said Sorensen. “But I was ignoring it, regardless. May I ask you a few questions?”
“This is an old reactor, isn’t it?” said Barry. “You’ve got me locked up in the core chamber.”
The doctor nodded. “One of the many projects the Armed Forces was working on. It was a breeder reactor, built beneath the proving ground to keep it isolated in case something went wrong. There’s no danger of radiation. The core never even reached the testing stage.”
“Radiation isn’t a big worry for me,” said Barry. “It was an accidental overdose of gamma radiation that altered my body chemistry and caused this startling metamorphosis to occur.”
“Really?” Sorensen picked up a clipboard. “Not the rubber band thing you mentioned earlier?”
Barry sighed.
Smith put his hand over the microphone and leaned forward to speak in the doctor’s ear. There was a brief pantomime between them. The government man stepped back and Sorensen glowered through the window. “Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?”
“I must, yes, but no one’s making pop culture any more so I’m starting to feel dated. I haven’t seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?”
The doctor stared at him.
“I’m never going to find out what the hell was going on with LOST . I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?”
&
nbsp; “Mister Burke,” said Smith, stepping forward again. With the tinny effect of the intercom, his young voice sounded like a cartoon. “I know this is frustrating for you. Probably a bit scary, too. I’m sorry we had to do it this way, but if you work with us I think you’ll find we all want the same things here.”
Barry pursed his lips and nodded. “Can I be honest with you, John?”
“Of course, Mister Burke. Can I call you Barry?”
“Please do. The thing is, John, Danielle thought sex with you was mediocre at best. She told me so herself right after you showed up.”
Smith’s smile became a tight line. He put his hand over the microphone again. The few words Barry could lip-read made him smile.
“Well,” said Sorensen once Smith had stepped away. “Perhaps it would be better if we just went to the questions.”
“You mean the interrogation?”
“Are you the same Barry Burke who worked at the Pulsed Power Program in New Mexico from July 2002 to January of 2008?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“How did you get your abilities? Was it a deliberate process or an accident?”
“I’m afraid that’s need-to-know information.”
“Well,” said Sorensen, “I need to know so I can—”
“Pass. Next question.”
“Stop acting so childish, Mr. Burke.”
“Or what? You’ll drug my dinner, too? Pardon me if I don’t feel like playing your little game.” Barry looked at Smith. The younger man was rubbing his temples.
“Madelyn loves games,” said the doctor.
“What?”
He was looking past Barry at the back wall of the reactor core. “My daughter, Madelyn. She’s very competitive. Loves games. My wife, Eva, thinks it’s amazing we get along so well, even though we’re so different.”
Barry looked at the older man. Sorensen’s face had gone slack, a body on autopilot. “Where are they now? Your wife and daughter. Are they here at Krypton?”
“I brought them out here to save them. I’m always trying to protect her, even when her mother tells me not to. I keep doing things to keep her safe.”
Smith put his hand over the microphone again. The two of them talked and Sorensen’s face became solid again. He leaned into the microphone and glared at Barry. “I would appreciate it,” said the doctor, “if you left my personal life out of this.”