Mark follows Darryl Montgomery’s recent path up the staircase, incredulous and silent. Arriving at the top floor, Mark sees Darryl get a drink and doesn’t care what happens to the man. Mark leaves Club Apocalypse and meets with FBI Deputy Director Matthew Carpenter in an undisclosed location. We are not privy to the contents of their conversation.
Dr. Camp is hard at work. He is preparing an electronic file on DEA Agent Derek Anderson, who could not escape his heritage nor fully assimilate his station in life. “It is of the same small bricks that the greatest and the worst men are made,” writes Dr. Camp. He clips this short note to a crumpled piece of writing in Agent Derek Anderson’s script, written when he was sixteen but recovered by an FBI forensics team from his mother and father’s home when he was thirty-four:
“I AM SORRY AMY. I LOVE YOU. I DID NOT WANT TO HURT YOU. BUT MY FATHER TOLD ME WHAT TO DO.”
Dr. Camp puts the note in with the rest of the documents assembled in the speckled-green cardstock folder prepared by Delta Green and prefixed by the chalky white piece of cardstock with an inch-and-a-half wide orange border. Repeated at the top and bottom, in large orange sans serif letters, are the words TOP SECRET. In the middle, also printed in orange but much smaller, are the words:
ALL INDIVIDUALS HANDLING THIS INFORMATION ARE REQUIRED TO PROTECT IT FROM UNAUTHORIZED DISCLOSURE IN THE INTEREST OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES.
HANDLING, STORAGE, REPRODUCTION AND DISPOSITION OF THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT WILL BE IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE EXECUTIVE ORDER(S), STATUTE(S) AND AGENCY IMPLEMENTING REGULATIONS.
(This cover sheet is unclassified.)
Cigarette ash dots the cover sheet, until Dr. Camp blows it away.
Dr. Camp files the folder in with the rest of his private files at the Library of Congress. DEA Agent Mark Darrin goes on to his next assignment. DEA agent, human being, and being of something simultaneously greater and lesser than human Derek Anderson ceases to exist. Dr. Camp lights a candle over Derek’s file. “In the fires of passion are cold realities cast,” Dr. Camp says. He wishes Derek’s spirit the best and the worst of luck, and privately wonders which came out on top in the end.
The Dark Above
Friday, February 7, 1997
She’s about twenty-five. Captain Forrest James of the U.S. Navy picked her up at a bar on Lakeview. They’re in his hotel room; their clothes are mingling in a pile on the floor. He’s in town for a seminar. He’s tall, well-built, blond hair going grey. Twenty-plus years in the service have given him a form of confidence, a certain bearing, that some women find very attractive. She certainly did. When she saw him in the bar, she thought of Harrison Ford. She bought him a drink, asked him to dance. Her name is Carly.
“Yes . . . ” she breathes. He’s kissing her breasts, his breath thick with liquor. “Yes . . . ” She barely recalls his name, but he’s good-looking. He’s got scars on his chest, weird scars, like from an animal attack. She runs her fingers over the scars as he kisses her. “Yes . . . ”
Captain James is drunk, wicked-bad drunk, having sex with a woman he doesn’t know. It’s the only form of intimate relationship he thinks he’s capable of anymore. She liked his edginess, his tales of a life in the Navy, his intimations of things he cannot speak of for reasons of national security. He seems like a dangerous man—but a comfortably dangerous man. He does not seem as if he’d hurt her for the world. He seems, rather, so profoundly grateful for her passion, her attraction, that he is like a child. “Yes . . . ”
She lies back on the bed, moans, wraps her fingers over the top of his head as he nuzzles at her. Aroused, excited, and rather drunk herself, she draws a pleasured breath. “Kiss me . . . Kiss me . . . ”
James kisses her, licks her, presses his face greedily towards her nipples. “Kiss me . . . here . . . ” she says.
Carly smoothly guides his yielding head down between her thighs, brings his lips up against her warmth, tenses her legs for the pleasure to come, expectant for his tongue.
James inhales.
The breath chokes in his throat. The smell curdles in his liquored brain. He’s on the deck of the sunken Santa Cruz, three hundred feet down. It’s 1981. The smell—the smell is everywhere, unaccountably permeating his SCUBA gear. The air from his tanks is somehow tainted with the smell of the green, gilled humanoids that are swarming over the rest of the SEAL team. It’s sea smell—the sea made choate, made alive, made mad. One of the freakish things lashes out, lacerates his suit, cuts his chest open and bleeding, leaves scars that Carly will stroke sixteen years later just before she wraps his face in her rich scent. His chest flares with remembered pain from the wound, remembered fear.
He obeys his training. He fights back.
The first blow breaks Carly’s nose. James roars, inhuman, throws a meaty fist into her gut, cracks two ribs. He brings his hands together into a mallet of flesh, brings it down, causes fractures in her skull, chips teeth, bloodies her lips. She cries out. He hits her again, and again, he’s wailing pathetically and he doesn’t know why, then he realizes, then he stops. He looks down at the bloody mass of her face, hears her sudden, ragged breathing, her terrible cry of pain and hurt and confusion, and his scream is both drunken and primal—two states connected in ways no psychologist would ever admit, suggesting as they do something of the human condition that is antithetical to modern psychology.
Hotel security finds James on the floor, curled in a fetal position, screaming his throat raw and clutching his chest, while Carly spits up blood and teeth and cries for help.
The landscape is littered with metal barrels. Dozens, hundreds of them. They contain an industrial cleanser, twenty years out of date and fifteen years illegal owing to carcinogens. This place was once a coastal plain, a mile from the shores of northern California. Today, it’s a newly inaugurated Superfund site—toxic waste, polluted ground-water, corporate culpability as far as the eye can see.
Shanty shacks line the property. FOST Oil deactivated this site fifteen years ago and left it to rot; squatters, ferried in by the cargo trains of the hobo network, took over the area around the site and no one cared enough to tell them not to, to tell them it wasn’t healthy. They were squatters in a remote rural area, far from population centers. They stole from farmers and worked odd jobs to buy milk and beer. No one cared about their little shanty town here at one of the worst toxic waste sites in the state.
Dr. Stephanie Park, an environmental scientist with a year-old doctorate, blinked back tears as she knelt in the clearing rimmed by tents. She looked at the fat orange sun looming low over the settlement.
Some of these squatters had been here for ten years. There were children, little boys and girls not five years old, with deformed features and obvious mental disabilities. Details magazine had written up this settlement three years ago, pitching it as a Fuck-the-Government commune for the truly out-of-the-loop. Meanwhile, the squatters drank contaminated water and ate half-tended vegetables from sickly tomato plants and splotchy lettuce patches. Don’t even ask about the frogs; five legs and three eyes were the norm before the local amphibian population died out entirely three years ago, a warning sign those at the scene either didn’t notice or didn’t care about.
These squatter folk were fucked. Being fucked socioeconomically was one thing; being fucked biochemically was another. Few of them would live another ten years—disenfranchised, they had no real expectation of relief. Their presence here violated so many laws that no useful lawyer would take their case against FOST: how can you sue someone for endangering you when you were present against the law?
The sun was going down on these people’s lives. Stephanie looked down at what she held in her arms—an infant born without a skull. She rocked him back and forth, while the half-assed midwife cleaned up the mother and gathered the afterbirth into a bucket. There was no guarantee that the placenta wouldn’t end up a meal for visiting raccoons, sending the chemicals of the site yet further into the regional ecosystem. The FOST site
was such a fuck-up that there was little point in trying to recover it; Stephanie could only chart the divergence, mark the point where the ecology took this mad path, and hope that maybe the information she collected for her employer, the Environmental Protection Agency, would help someone else.
Stephanie sucked up guilt like a Hoover. She wanted to take every crime committed by her government, her employer, her race, her species, and absorb it into herself. Her capacity for absorbing pain was grossly overestimated. She desperately needed to draw lines, to establish priorities. She could only eat the pain and make it her own.
The infant did not last the night. Stephanie went to bed late, eyes red from crying.
The next morning she was roused from the makeshift EPA tent to deal with yet another birth, yet another maudlin situation. She got up, still half-dreaming of her old college boyfriend, wondering how she had chosen a path that led through such misery, when she was taken to a ragged tent where a girl scarcely past puberty had given birth during the quiet hours of morning before the sun rose.
She looked at the mother, whose ignorance and ill health were writ large on her face. Stephanie’s eyes welled with tears at the thought of another tragedy, another crime laid at the feet of FOST Oil that they would never pay for, when she finally saw the infant.
The large-eyed little boy took short, sharp breaths, like any newborn infant coping with life in a gaseous environment, coping with leaving the liquid womb.
But he was breathing through gills in his neck.
Stephanie staggered back, cried out, blew her nose into a crinkly handkerchief. “Oh God,” she cried, first stumbling, then falling back into the reeds, “oh God, no, no, oh God . . . ” The young mother beamed with idiot happiness as her little pride and joy flapped his gill slits and processed the unfamiliar air for the first time. Stephanie curled her legs up to her chest and wrapped them with her arms and wished that this damnable current of knowledge had never split her placid sea of ignorance.
If she’d had a gun, she might have killed the child on the spot. Instead, she would begin to love him.
The Washington, D.C., Naval Yard is home to ships, sailors—and academics. The headquarters of the Library of Congress is here, for reasons that no longer matter. Within the administration offices, Dr. Joseph Camp—the leader of Delta Green—stared at the decrypted email message on his desktop computer. It came from Dr. Stephanie Park of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Dr. Camp drummed his thick fingers on his cluttered desk, stirring tremors in his coffee. Dr. Park was a Delta Green friendly: an ally, a contact, but not someone brought fully into the fold. She was not an agent. She believed that Delta Green was a covert program serving under the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She had no idea that those very officials had disbanded Delta Green in 1970, the year she was born, and that it had operated as an illegal conspiracy ever since.
The thing about covert programs, Dr. Camp reflected, was that they were easy to mimic if you were in the government. All you had to do was feign authority and speak with certainty. Your basic civil servant, when confronted with a presentation of secrecy from someone with security clearances she’s never heard of, will believe whatever is said. What is she going to do—ask her boss? “Hey, boss, this guy under the Joint Chiefs of Staff says he’s with a covert program and needs my confidential help. Is this for real?” Bam—kiss that promotion goodbye, you stupid shit. There were so many covert programs running in Washington that it was pointless to pursue verification, not to mention that it ran against protocol. The unspoken reality was that anyone with the balls—sorry, the PC term was brass—to feign membership in a covert program was probably someone you wanted on your side as you crawled up the wall of seniority. If you were a woman, they might help you hammer through that glass ceiling and, wonder of wonders, might not even ask for sex in return; better than the drill sergeants on the nightly news, at least. I’m from the government, and I’m here to help. Welcome to the civil service.
“Dr. Camp?”
Ms. Buie was at his door. A staffer with the library’s Federal Research Division, she worked among many scurrying drones collating information requested by other government employees. She was another Delta Green friendly, only barely; she’d never heard of Delta Green, but when Dr. Camp needed a bit of research done after hours or behind closed doors, Ms. Buie helped out. For that spirit of generosity, she was now in the Delta Green database as a friendly; should push come to shove, she would, by default, be one of the many dozens of sacrificial lambs tossed to congressional investigators or wetworks death squads while the real Delta Green covered its tracks and headed for the hills. The organization had one overriding priority that made such casual horrors commonplace: containment. Containment of threat, containment of disaster, containment of knowledge. So it went. Buie was ignorant of the dangers of the waters in which she swam. She was a beautiful woman of fifty-nine, nineteen years younger than Camp, with lush cocoa skin and a smile that crinkled her cheeks in a way that made Camp feel like a spry fifty-five again.
“Yes, Carssandra?”
“You paged me, Dr. Camp?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve got one of my special requests for you.”
Carssandra Buie gave him one of her winning, crinkly smiles. “What do you need, Joe?”
“FOST Oil has a site in northern California near Roscoe that has recently joined the EPA’s Superfund list. I’d just like a look at their file, if you can get it for me.”
She was quiet for a moment, her face intent. Then she smiled again. “I know someone over there. No problem.”
“I won’t need it for long. Just need to make some notes.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
Carssandra left. Camp watched her glide down the hall, and sighed.
Then he picked up the phone and began dialing. A lot of numbers were involved. The call went through Delta Green’s encryption router, which blocked all known tracers and taps. Forty-five seconds later, he was on the phone with Rear Admiral Harley Patton, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
“Harley? This is Alphonse.” Dr. Camp used his Delta Green code name. “I need Agent Darren, pronto.” Darren was another Delta Green code name, belonging to one Captain Forrest James, commander of SEAL Team 7 and a Delta Green agent since 1988 whose specialty was a scarce race of primitive, ocean-dwelling humanoids unknown to modern science but apparently antagonistic towards humanity. In decades past, they had attempted interbreeding with humans as a means of asserting power over isolated coastal towns. (Unaccountably, they were genetically and physiologically compatible with humans.) Delta Green’s existence could be traced back to a large-scale, successful military operation against these creatures in 1927, at a Massachusetts town called Innsmouth. The government used the Red Scare of the period to cloak the operation, claiming that the town held seditionists and anarchists along the lines of Sacco and Vanzetti; this falsehood concealed a loathsome truth that, it was judged, the public did not need to know. Captain James was one of a handful of currently active Delta Green agents who had faced these creatures directly, and was by far the most experienced: eradicating them seemed to be his personal crusade.
Dr. Camp listened for a few moments to the response to his request.
“Well, shit.”
Dr. Stephanie Park’s plane touched down in San Francisco that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, she was in a taxi into the heart of the City on the Bay. When she arrived at the metropolitan jail, she paid the driver and kept the receipt. Taxes.
Inside, she took out the credit card delivered to her with the plane tickets and some odds and ends by courier that morning and posted bail for one Captain Forrest James.
The first few minutes of the car ride passed in silence. Captain James sat in the passenger seat, large and sullen and still hung over. His face was covered in bruises. Even given his condition, he was a handsome man.
Driving the rental car that had been waiting for her at the jail (courtesy of Alphons
e), Stephanie hazarded a few glances in Captain James’ direction. Finally, tired of waiting for his questions, she spoke.
“I’m not with the ONI, Captain. I’m an investigator with the EPA. I’m here on behalf of Delta Green.”
James looked at her and a death-rattle chuckle escaped his throat. “Jumping fuck.” His face was expressionless.
“I thought you surrendered without a struggle. Those bruises on your face—did the police do that to you in interrogation?”
James shook his head. “Self-inflicted. I woke up mad and had to hit something. Figured I’d hurt my knuckles less on my face than on the wall.”
Stephanie ignored this last comment. She exhaled slowly and spoke the words she’d been rehearsing for the last few miles, and on the plane before that. “Look, I don’t know what your story is. I know what you did to that poor woman, and if it wasn’t for the fact that your experience is allegedly instrumental in my investigation, I’d have left you there to rot. My intention is to make the most of your insight as quickly as possible and then put you right back in jail where you belong. From what I gather, the Navy isn’t going to cut you any slack. Your career in the military is probably over. You’re a reverse poster child for the new and improved armed forces, which means that as a drunk and an abuser of women you’re going to be sent up the river. Given the classified nature of my investigation, your work with me is not going to help you score any points with your superiors and it certainly won’t be admitted as evidence in your trial and therefore will not help to sway a judge. If you don’t think you’re going to contribute anything meaningful to my work, we can turn around right now and put you back in the hands of the SFPD. This isn’t shore leave. It’s your call.”
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 5