by James Cook
There were hand wraps and sixteen-ounce gloves in a small locker near the punching bags, so I put in eight rounds, alternating between punches, kicks, elbows, and knee strikes. Last, I cooled down with fifteen minutes of stretching.
Back in the officer’s quarters, I rinsed off the sweat and grime in the communal shower, shaved, and put on a clean uniform. A check of the time informed me I had only managed to kill half the day.
There was no one in the warehouse when I entered, so I checked the racks of weapons and ammunition and found they were not locked or secured in any way. I took an M-4 from a shelf and a box of 840 rounds from an open crate. I also procured two thirty-round magazines. The rifle did not have an ACOG, but it did have iron sights. Better than nothing.
The range was manned when I visited for the second time. A private about my age sat behind a small desk thumbing through a dog-eared paperback. His chair was tilted back, feet crossed on the tabletop. He sat up straight when he saw me come in.
“Good afternoon, sir.”
I was wearing no insignia, but somehow he knew I was an officer. “Word travels fast around here, huh?” I asked, smiling.
He relaxed and smiled back. “Small place. Not a lot of people here. Putting in some range time, sir?”
A shrug. “Beats staring at a wall.”
“That it does. Just need you to sign in.”
He flipped a log around and put a pen on top of it. I wrote my name and rank, the serial number of the rifle I was using, and how many rounds I had come in with. Simple enough.
“You got eyes and ears, sir?”
I checked my pockets and cursed. “No. Guess I forgot. I need to go get ‘em?”
“No sir, got you covered.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a pair of safety glasses, yellow ear protectors, and a small box of foam earplugs. “Gotta wear double hearing protection if you’re not running a suppressor. Small room, you know?”
“Fair enough.”
There were seven lanes to choose from. I took one in the center and put down the rifle and ammo. On the opposite side of the room from the check-in desk was a low shelf loaded with range supplies including targets, small sandbags, and short stools. I grabbed three sandbags, a stool, and a paper target.
Since the M-4 I’d procured had never been fired, I put a hundred rounds through it to break it in. The shots grouped well, but wandered around a bit once the barrel heated up. I let it cool a couple of minutes and then set to work zeroing the rifle.
I fired the first group from a seated position with the rifle balanced on two bags in front and one beneath the stock. The group was less than an inch, but the gun was shooting high and left. I adjusted the front sight post for elevation and the rear aperture for windage, and tried again. This time I was on center.
The two types of ammo I would most likely be using—M193 and M855—have highly similar ballistic paths out to 250 yards with a hundred yard zero. To achieve this at 25 yards, I adjusted the sights until I was grouping shots between 1.5 and 2 inches below my point of aim. Not exactly precise, but close enough.
There were numerous small targets outside the man-shaped center target, to I sent groups at all of them. The rifle was accurate and did not malfunction. When I had burned through about five hundred rounds, the paper target was barely held together and I had grown bored. So I used one of the cleaning kits the range had on hand, lubed the rifle, and walked over to the desk.
“There any rules against me keeping this?”
“No sir,” the private said. “Just need you to fill out a requisition form. Got a rifle you need to turn in?”
“I do, actually.”
“Just bring it to the armory, sir. They’ll take it off your hands.”
I filled out the form, took the M-4 back to my room, and dropped my old rifle off at the armory. It occurred to me that as exotic as a top secret underground government bunker may seem at first blush, the reality of daily life here was depressingly similar to life in regular infantry. The principal activities seemed to involve eating, sleeping, training, and filling out paperwork. Not exactly movie of the week material.
Since I had nothing else to do, I took my combat optics—an ACOG and a VCOG—and zeroed them both at the range. Then I cleaned and lubed the gun again and turned in my unexpended ammo to the armory, signed another paper, and checked my watch.
It was only two-thirty.
I smelled food. I walked to the mess hall and found four older civilians putting what was left of lunch away. One of them, a woman in her late sixties, peered at me through a pair of glasses.
“You need a bite to eat?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Missed chow, did you?” a man said. He looked almost as old as the woman.
“Afraid so,” I said. “But I won’t make excuses. Take anything you got to spare.”
The old woman went around the corner for a few minutes and came back with a plate of lima beans, collard greens, flatbread, and some kind of shredded meat.
“Not to look the gift horse in the mouth,” I said, “but what kind of meat is this?”
“That would be chevon,” the old man said, grinning. “Ever heard of it?”
“Chevon is French for goat, if memory serves.”
The old man cackled. “’Fraid so. It’s not bad though. A little stringy, but the flavor’s good.”
“Where does it come from?”
“There’s goats galore back east,” the old woman said. “Folks’re farming them all over out there. Hell, you can shoot ‘em wild. Meat’s cheaper’n chicken these days. Army makes jerky out of it and air drops it every couple of weeks. Have to soak it overnight to make it edible. Ain’t exactly prime rib, but it beats the hell out of survival rations.”
I pinched a scrap between two fingers and tried it. As the old man said, it was a bit stringy, but did not taste bad.
“Thanks,” I said, and walked over to a table.
I ate alone. It was quiet, save for muted conversation between the kitchen workers. The mess hall was not large, built for maybe fifty people at a time. The tables were sturdy, constructed of stainless steel and some kind of wood composite with a vinyl veneer, and the chairs were made of plastic and steel and were stackable. I’d seen them a thousand times at churches, schools, and government buildings all over the country. I wondered if the same company had made them all. I wondered how the kitchen workers wound up slinging hash down here in this remote bunker of indeterminate age. I wondered how long it would be before the final assault against the ROC, or KPA, or whatever the hell they called themselves, began.
My first couple of days in the bunker had been a nice break from the horrors of the surface world, but I found myself growing anxious. This place was not home. Miranda was home.
I wanted to get back to her.
*****
I lay down in the mid-afternoon, closed my eyes, and focused on keeping my mind empty. After a while, I drifted off and had a dream that jolted me awake. I sat up in bed and stared at the darkness, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal.
What did I dream about?
I searched and searched, but found nothing. Finally I lay back down and turned on the lamp next to my bed. Dim orange light filled the room, not quite reaching the far corners. I had a sense of urgency. There was someone I needed to talk to.
Stop it. Go back to sleep.
I gave it an honest try. But just as I was drifting off, a name entered my mind unbidden. I thought about what I had read of Freud’s research regarding the sub-conscious mind. As I did, I sat up and tied my shoes without realizing I was doing it until it was already happening.
Fuck it. Go with it. See where it leads.
I thought about what my step-mother had taught me as a kid about approaching strangers. Gifts were always a good way to break the ice. I thought about the man I was going to see. I thought about the couple of times I had walked close to him and smelled a faint hint of liquor. I thought about how
his eyes had been bloodshot behind his glasses, and there were little blooms of ruptured capillaries beginning to form around his nose and on his cheeks. He was a drinker.
Takes one to know one.
I dressed, neatened my appearance, brushed my teeth, and grabbed my lock picks. There was a security door in the warehouse with a simple metal placard that read ‘CLEANING SUPPLIES’. If I were stationed here and needed a place to stash booze, that would be my first candidate.
The lock was simple and took me about fifteen seconds to pick. Once inside, I closed the door and turned on a small flashlight I’d brought with me. The first pass revealed nothing. No hidden compartments, no bottles stashed under piles of rags or dirty towels, no boxes or other containers that didn’t belong there. Which meant if there was booze in here, it was hidden in plain sight.
The light moved over bottle after bottle of cleaning liquids. Most of them I dismissed out of hand, but on a low shelf, tucked behind white boxes of Borax, I found six clear glass bottles. An upraised section of glass lettering said they contained one liter each. Plain labels listed the contents as ‘HYDROGEN PEROXIDE’. I picked one up and examined it closely. Hydrogen peroxide usually comes in dark plastic bottles, and I had never seen one in full liter size. Furthermore, the bottle had a decorative swirl on its upper third that reminded me of the white distilled vinegar my stepmother kept around for cleaning purposes. A closer examination of the label revealed it had been printed out on standard paper and stuck to the glass bottle with cheap adhesive. I opened the cap and sniffed.
Definitely not hydrogen peroxide.
I took a small sip and swirled it around. Not bad. I’d had better, but I was reasonably certain it would not poison me or cause permanent loss of vision. I slipped the bottle in a small assault back I’d brought along and quietly stepped out of the room. Looked left, looked right. No one.
I approached the door leading to the area set aside for the Phoenix Initiative. The door was locked, but the lock was no more sophisticated than the one on the supply closet. I had it open in seconds and strolled casually inside.
There was no one in the hall. I kept up the slow, unconcerned saunter I’d entered with. When traversing areas one is not authorized to be, it is best to appear as if you belong there. Do it well enough and no one will question your presence.
At first, I was not sure how I was going to find my destination. But then I noticed the doors were labeled plainly. Water treatment lab. Infirmary. Chemical storage. Hazardous waste. Cleaning supplies. Electronic and electromechanical repair. At an intersection, I read a placard that said the restrooms and the dining hall were to my right, and living quarters were to my left. I turned left.
Red placards flanked me on both sides as I entered the living quarters. They read, ‘Authorized Personnel Only’. I walked past them.
As it turned out, the rooms were numbered and had name labels next to each door. It did not take long to figure out there were only a few people living there, which made for a short search.
I knocked on the appropriate door. Faraday answered a moment later and stared at me.
“Captain Hicks.”
“I was hoping to have a word with you,” I said.
Faraday leaned out his door and checked the hallway. “I’m afraid you’re not supposed to be here. How did you get in?”
I shrugged. “Door was open.”
“That’s odd. It shouldn’t have been. I’ll have to-”
“You got time for a drink?” I said, holding up the bottle. I had removed the hydrogen peroxide label.
“What’s that?” Faraday asked, staring at the bottle. There was an avaricious gleam in his eye.
“Moonshine. Ain’t the best, but it ain’t the worst either.”
Another check of the hallway. “Well…all right then,” Faraday said quietly. “I suppose there’s no harm in it. Please come in.”
I entered. Faraday checked the hallway one last time and closed the door. I heard the lock click into place.
The room was almost identical to mine. I sat down in the kitchen and put the bottle on the table.
“Got any glasses?”
THIRTY-THREE
It did not take long to get Faraday drunk.
In the process, I learned that his first name was Alexander, call me Alex. He was born in Manchester, England, and had lived there until he was eleven. A few months after his birthday, his father brought the family across the pond to take a job at an investment firm in New York. I told Faraday he still had his accent. The more he drank, the thicker it got.
I kept the conversation light to begin with, mostly asking him about how he came to work for the Phoenix Initiative. He was guarded at first, but a few more drinks loosened him up.
“I don’t know why I’m still so reluctant to talk about it,” he said. “Most of it’s been declassified anyway.”
“Get it off your chest,” I said. “You’ll feel better.”
Faraday drained his glass and reached for the bottle. I had barely taken a few sips.
“They approached me while I was at university,” he said. “I was graduating in a few months and had already served an internship with the CDC. I suppose that’s how they learned about me. Top marks, magna cum laude, letters of recommendation from several of my professors, all the accolades a young academic could ask for. Mum was quite proud. Father seemed to view the whole affair as a matter of course. He was like that. Perfect English reserve, stiff upper lip, kept everyone at arm’s length, never too strong a praise nor too strict a condemnation for any behavior on my part, good or ill. I don’t think he raised his voice once in his whole bloody life.”
Another long pull of moonshine. “Miserable bastard.”
Faraday was growing morose. Booze does that to some people. I did not want him going off on a tangent about how his father didn’t hug him enough, so I decided to steer the conversation elsewhere.
“Who approached you?”
“Oh, a couple of bureaucratic types. You know the ones, ugly suits, federal ID badges, schoolboy haircuts. It was pre-9/11 America back then. If I’d joined the Initiative after that, it probably would have been Homeland Security knocking on my door.”
“Who did they say they were with?”
“The Department of Health and Human Services.”
“What were they recruiting for?”
Faraday drained his glass. I refilled it for him. “Cheers,” he said, taking a long drink. “As I recall, they said it was a research position. Top secret research, mind you. An opportunity to be on the front lines of global pandemic prevention, they said. And of course I believed them. Why wouldn’t I? I was one of the preeminent minds in my field, after all. That’s what everyone was saying about me, and no one was more convinced of the truth of that statement than I was. I was so brilliant, in fact, that I signed the paperwork without even reading it. Couldn’t quite see past the stars in my eyes, or the visions of my name being announced at a convention of Nobel laureates.” He laughed bitterly and stared into his drink. “How quickly dreams fade.”
“What happened?”
He did not answer for a while. He finished his drink and had another one. I was beginning to worry he would pass out before I could get anything useful out of him.
“Everything was all right at first,” he said finally. “The job was exactly what they said it would be. I worked on a project that was the precursor to AIM-38. It was exciting for a while. But then months turned into years, and the proverbial rush of blood to the head faded, and I matured a bit and began to notice things were somewhat…odd.”
“Odd how?”
“I’ll give you an example. Part of the benefits package was paid housing. They put me up in a modest two-bedroom apartment not far from the research campus where I worked. The campus was in a small town in northern Virginia near Washington DC. Quite a few of my coworkers lived in the same building as I did. For the first year or two we barely spoke to each other. The labs were highly compartmentali
zed, you see, like silos. Cross-pollination was not encouraged. Sensitive nature of the work and all that. But there was this one girl that caught my eye, and I’m not embellishing to say I caught hers as well. We began seeing each other. Nothing too overt, just the occasional dinner at her place or mine, drinks, conversation, sex. It was a nice arrangement. We grew quite close. But then Patricia wanted to go out on proper dates. Began making overtures about moving in together. Said with our combined salaries we could afford to rent a proper house.”
Faraday went to take another drink, but his glass was empty again. He gazed at it irritably and refilled it.
“And then, without warning, it all ended. I stopped on my way home that night and bought some good red wine and Patricia’s favorite cheese and knocked on her door expecting my usual warm welcome. I received nothing of the sort.”
Faraday stopped to pour another drink. Half the liter of moonshine was gone now. “She opened the door just a crack, kept it on the chain like I was a criminal or something. And that was exactly how she looked at me—like she was afraid. Her eyes were wide and frightened. She told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. I laughed. I thought it was some kind of a joke. ‘Come on, love. Let us in’, I said. She shut the door in my face and locked it and told me to go away.”
Faraday put down his drink and stared blearily at the wall. After a few seconds, he removed his glasses and let them hang from his fingers.
“I was gutted. Absolutely gutted. I couldn’t believe it. How could she be so cold after all we’d shared? Just days before she wants to move in together, and now I can’t get her to so much as look at me. I racked my brain trying to think of what I might have done to push her away. I begged and pleaded, and one day I knocked on her door and told her I wasn’t leaving until she spoke to me. She called the police. I was drunk. I tried to fight them and wound up spending the night in jail.”
He picked his drink up, drained it, and put his glasses back on. “My department head called me on the carpet when I returned to work. I was barely functional. She told me to go home and rest and come back in the morning. When I did, I was ushered into her office straightaway. She explained that Patricia was being reassigned to another project, but they wanted me to stay on there in Virginia. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but my research was progressing very rapidly. My team and I were making breakthroughs on a regular basis. Much faster than other teams working on similar projects. I was the subject of a great deal of admiration by some, and envy by others. I accepted my employer’s desire to retain me at face value and agreed to stay.”