“Hello, Hank,” Dr. Camp said evenly, addressing him by his real name.
Hank Steiner stood on the front steps in an overcoat, holding a rain-spattered cardboard box. His hair was damp from the storm outside, but the tears on his face weren’t from the rain. His eyes were red and he was shaking. “Joe,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “Oh God, Joe, oh Jesus.”
Dr. Camp stood to one side and ushered him in. “Get in out of the rain, Hank. Just set the box down over there.” Hank stumbled inside and laid his burden down by the armchair. Dr. Camp closed the door and watched Hank. His right hand remained in his pocket.
“Hank, what’s wrong?”
Hank turned around, blubbering. “Ah Jesus, Joe, fuckin’ Jesus . . . they did it, they did it to me, oh shit, they did it to me.”
“Steady on, Hank. What are you talking about?”
The man was weeping, great shuddering sobs rocking through his body. He said something unintelligible and pulled open his overcoat. Beneath, he had no shirt on.
His chest was stained with purple dye.
Dr. Camp flicked off the safety on the handgun in his pocket. “All right, Hank. I understand. Now listen—are you listening to me?”
Hank nodded and wiped his face, still crying.
“I want you to strip down. We’ll get you in the shower, wash off the dye, and then we’ll spray you again and see exactly what the situation is. I’ll need to take some photographs.”
“I was just working with the stuff, you know?” Hank said, shaking, as he pulled off the overcoat. “The concentrate, it’s a real fine powder. It was all in the air, you know? Just floating. Then I looked down and saw . . . I saw . . . m-my hand . . .” The overcoat was crumpled to the floor now, and Hank was staring at his right hand. Dr. Camp could see a dim purple discoloration over the man’s entire arm.
“Steady on, Hank,” Dr. Camp said again. Then he noticed something.
Hank’s tears were now running out of his eyes and up his face, over his forehead and into the tangle of wet hair on his scalp. Hank started looking up and around, reacting to the odd sensation. Suddenly he understood. “Oh Jesus, Joe—”
The first shot struck Hank Steiner in the heart, sending his system into shock. The second punctured his left lung. Blood spattered on the armchair. Hank’s eyes were pools of liquid fear.
Dr. Camp lowered the handgun and slowly backed away, tracking Agent Stan as he collapsed to the living-room floor. “Twenty-three skiddoo!” he bellowed. There was a beep. Armored steel shutters slammed down behind all the windows and doors in the small house, and all the lights went on. Hank’s right arm liquified as the neo-tissue abandoned its shape, and then blood from the raw stump began to pour onto the carpet. Bloody gashes appeared all over his naked chest as the rest of the neo-tissue liquified, unsealing the invisible surgery scars. His body cavity opened up like an envelope and his innards bulged out. His scalp and the top of his skull dissolved, leaving a mass of hair on the carpet and his pulsing brain exposed to the air. All of the neo-tissue ran together into a blob the size of a large cat. Dr. Camp turned and hustled down the side hall, his heart pumping wildly as he fumbled for his keys with his left hand. Reaching the door to the spare bedroom, he got the keys out and found the one he needed. Down the hall, the blob was rolling across the carpet towards him.
He got the key in the lock, and the pause while the security system verified his identity seemed like an eternity. Then the door opened, he stepped inside, and slammed it shut behind him. A moment later the internal seals kicked in, leaving the room impregnable.
Dr. Camp took two steps forward and grabbed at a chair for support. His breathing was heavy and ragged, and his face was damp with sweat. He set the gun down on the desk.
The secure telephone rang. Dr. Camp fumbled with it for a moment before he got the receiver up to his face. It was Agent Adam, calling about the alarm that Dr. Camp’s computer had tripped when he’d spoken the activation phrase.
“It’s all right, Adam,” he said. “Just had—” He paused for breath. “Just had a bit of excitement here . . . no, I’m okay. But I can’t leave this room just yet. Listen, I need you to activate Agent Nancy. Get her handlers to bring her here in a couple hours. The situation should be under control by then. I’ll have dinner prepared for her . . . no, you stay there. Just make the arrangements . . . okay . . . exactly. Goodbye.”
Dr. Camp hung up the phone and took a deep breath. He spent a few moments reloading his handgun and checking the action, mostly just to calm his nerves—a trick he’d been using since his first days under fire, back in the Second World War. When he had regained his composure, he picked up the phone again and dialed. He didn’t have to wait long.
“Good evening, Andrea. This is Alphonse.”
Highway 321 wound through the eastern Tennessee landscape, bracketed by rolling hills, forests, farms, and the Smoky Mountains looming just to the southeast. The sun was obscured by clouds and the air was cold and clammy. It was an ugly morning.
Frank Carincola trembled. He tapped out patterns on the steering wheel as he drove the rental car, and kept pushing his bifocals back up his nose; the sweat on his face let them slide down again within moments.
In the seat next to him, Sonja Dewey had a worried look on her face. She was twenty-four, and Phenomen-X was her first job out of college. This was her second season with the show. She was short and slim, with short-cropped black hair and a winning smile that had made her very popular with the viewers. A month ago some forged photos of her head atop a naked woman’s body had made the rounds of the internet; she took it as a sign that she’d arrived. She didn’t put much stock in the bizarro stories she reported on for the show, but it was a better job than most of her classmates had scored. They were stuck in Small Town, U.S.A., and she at least was on a national program, albeit a syndicated one that usually played in the wee hours.
“So we’re almost there?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yeah,” Frank replied. “I think the exit used to be just up ahead.”
“Used to be?”
“I came back out here four months after the first trip. The exit was closed off. I had to take the next one and backtrack into the valley.”
In the back seat, Allen Eddington snored. He was an old-school photojournalist with decades of fieldwork under his belt. He took a bullet in Sarajevo in ’94 and decided he was ready to settle down, so he landed the videography gig with Phenomen-X and figured he’d take it easy. He was adept at grabbing a few minutes of shut-eye under any circumstances.
They came around a bend and saw a road sign: EXIT 5 TO PROMISE 1 MILE.
“That’s the one after Groversville?” Sonja asked.
Frank shrugged. “I guess. I don’t remember the name of the town.”
“Do you think we’ll have any trouble getting into Groversville?”
“I didn’t. There were warnings up and the road was blocked, but I just drove around. There was nobody there to stop me. Deserted.”
“That’s so strange,” Sonja said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe the whole town just left and nobody noticed.”
“Well, the CDC had it locked down for a few weeks and they relocated the county seat. That bullshit Hantavirus outbreak. There were a few stories when the quarantine lifted—the town rebuilding, that kind of crap. Then nada. By the time I came back, everybody’d left and no one gave a damn anymore.”
They sat in silence until the exit appeared. Frank signaled and pulled off the highway. The road they entered was narrow two-lane blacktop, recently paved. The growth here was all wild, the winter-bare boughs of trees jabbing chaotically over the road, thatchy skeletons of leafless underbrush blocking the view at ground level. There didn’t seem to be any farms or houses here.
The road was even more winding than the highway they’d left behind. Frank tried to keep the car at forty miles an hour, but the frequent sharp curves meant he kept having to punch the brakes. His driving made Sonja tens
e. To keep their speed up, he was taking the curves pretty wide, banking out into the other lane.
“Easy, Frank,” she said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He wasn’t bothering with his glasses, now, either; he just tilted his head back a little to keep his sight line through the bifocals clear. “What’s wrong, Frank?”
He didn’t reply. Instead he kept jerking his head to the right, trying to catch a glimpse of something through the trees outside Sonja’s window.
“What is it?”
“Can’t be,” he muttered between glances.
“What?” Sonja asked again, annoyed now at his behavior. Then she screamed.
It was a white panel van, a big one. The logo on the hood—the front hood, the one pointing straight at them—read FEDERAL EXPRESS. Frank was turned towards the side window. Sonja grabbed the steering wheel and pulled hard to the right. The van veered left. Their car shot off the damp road, missing the van, and jumped a ditch before blowing into the underbrush.
The driver of the van slammed on the brakes and pulled off the road. He jumped out and ran across to where the sedan had left the pavement, swearing to himself, a first-aid kit under one arm.
When he found them, Sonja was on the ground on her hands and knees, shaking. Allen was sitting up in the back seat, yelling curses and rubbing his shoulder. But Frank—Frank was standing on the roof of the sedan, looking off through the branches of the trees.
“You folks okay?” asked the driver, nervously fumbling with the first-aid kit. “Ma’am?”
Sonja looked up and nodded, taking a deep breath. “I think I’m okay. I . . .” Her voice trailed off as Allen got out of the car. “I’m not fucking okay!” he bellowed. “I’ve got a fucking idiot for a news director! Frank, what the hell were you doing?”
Frank ignored him, intent on whatever he was looking at.
“Frank!” Allen yelled again, mad as hell.
“Frank, what are you doing?” Sonja asked quietly, her voice still weak from shock. The driver looked around at the trio, thinking It wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t my fault. Shit! Shit! Shit!
Frank spun around and looked at the driver. “What’s that town down there?” he asked, pointing through the trees behind him.
The driver wondered if this guy had a concussion. “Uh, that’s Promise, sir.”
“What the fuck is Promise? There was no goddamn Promise here!”
“No, it’s new, sir. Some kinda corporate town. I was just down there making deliveries.”
“What used to be here?”
“Oh,” said the driver, relieved now that the conversation was making more sense. “Groversville. They tore it all down and started building that place. Maybe a year or so ago. Just got up and running a couple months back.”
Frank turned away and looked through the trees. He shook his head and muttered something to himself.
Their car had come to a halt on an overgrown ridge, part of the V-shaped rise that defined the small, narrow valley where Groversville had been. It all looked familiar to Frank, but at the same time it was so very new. A town was there, but it wasn’t Groversville—not a single building was the same. There were new houses, new businesses, all done in the same old-fashioned architectural style, all planned and executed with precision. It was an idealized replica of turn-of-the-century Americana, sprung up here in the valley like a fertile thought taken root in the rich Tennessee soil.
“Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Frank said, taking in the sight.
Sonja was standing up slowly, helped by the driver. “You folks want me to call some help?” he asked. Allen and Sonja looked at each other, then at Frank.
“Nope,” Frank said. “We’ll take it from here.”
The driver looked at each of them again briefly, to make sure they weren’t dazed or bleeding or just plain ticked off at him. Then he nodded and said, “Okay. Watch those curves, folks. You can’t go too fast on the roads ’round here.”
“We’ll be careful,” Sonja said quietly. The driver nodded again and stomped off through the brush, sweating bullets and glad as hell that he wasn’t going to get fired over this foolishness.
Allen climbed up on the car and stood alongside Frank. He looked down into the valley below them. “So that’s Promise, huh?”
“No,” Frank said. “It’s Groversville. It’s still Groversville.”
That afternoon, Abe returned to the Knoxville motel with a large cardboard box he’d picked up at the airport. Alphonse had phoned them that morning—sounding rather haggard, Vic thought—to give them the shipping info and also to inform them that they shouldn’t open the box until they called him.
Abe gave the usual knock at the door—the old shave-and-a-haircut—before unlocking it and stepping in. Stephanie and Vic were sitting on one of the beds, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper. “I’m back, ladies,” Abe announced grandly. “And I’ve brought donuts.”
Vic winced. “Ew. No bagels, I suppose?”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Abe replied with a smile. He tossed the bag of donuts on the bed and closed the door behind him. Stephanie began rummaging in the bag. Abe brought the large box over to the table and took out a pocketknife. He started to cut the tape.
“Whoa!” Vic said. “Hang on. We gotta call Alphonse before you do that.”
“Right, right,” Abe said. “Maybe he left his dentures inside by mistake.”
Vic shot him a snarky look and began dialing on her cell phone. Stephanie munched on a glazed old-fashioned. “I can’t believe people actually soak these things in coffee,” she said to no one in particular. Abe plopped down in one of the padded chairs next to the table and watched Vic on the phone.
“This is Agent Tonya,” she said. “We’ve got the box . . . okay, just a minute.” Vic rummaged in her carry-on bag and pulled out a small speaker unit and some cords. “Alphonse wants this on the speakerphone,” she said by way of explanation as she plugged the unit into a wall socket and then into her cordless phone. “Okay, Alphonse, we’re all here.”
“Good,” came the voice over the speaker. “Now first things first. When was the last time any of you saw Agent Shasta? In person, I mean. This is very important.”
Vic thought for a moment. “Must have been three months ago, just after the Baltimore op. I made my report to him about Agent Tim’s death.”
Abe nodded. “Same here, Alphonse. I was with Tonya for that report.”
Stephanie continued to eat her donut.
“Agent Terry?” Alphonse said.
Stephanie swallowed and took a sip of coffee. “About three weeks ago.”
“What?” Vic cried. “What the fuck?”
“Three weeks ago!” Stephanie repeated, angry and defensive. “All right?”
“No, not all right,” Vic replied. “You see him a week before he disappears and you don’t bother to fucking mention it? What is this shit, Steph?”
“Don’t call me fucking Steph,” she replied quietly. “My name is Stephanie.”
“Agent Terry,” Alphonse emphasized from the speaker. “Tell us about the last time you saw Agent Shasta.”
Stephanie sighed. “We were seeing each other, okay? We were dating. Last time I saw him, he broke it off. He dumped me.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Vic exclaimed. Abe rubbed his forehead and stared at the wall.
“It’s not relevant, okay? It’s fucking personal,” Stephanie shouted. “Don’t you think I’ve gone back over that night over and over since this op started? He didn’t say a goddamn thing that had anything to do with him disappearing. It was strictly personal.”
They all sat in silence for a moment—Alphonse by proxy—before Abe spoke. “How long had you been dating?”
“Not long,” Stephanie replied sullenly. “Maybe three months. It was just a stupid fling.”
“What is he, like twice your age?” Vic barked. “Jesus, Terry, I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.”
“It just wasn’t
any of your business,” she replied, almost in a whisper.
Alphonse sighed audibly over the speaker. “All right, calm down. This is something you should have shared with your cell, Terry, but let’s move on. You saw him a week before he disappeared. Did he say anything about the op he’d just been on?”
“No,” Stephanie said. “I didn’t even know he’d been on that op until Vic told me—I mean, Agent Tonya told me—a couple days ago. We didn’t talk about Delta Green, ever. That was sort of the point, you know?”
“I see,” Alphonse said. “Now I want all three of you to listen to me very carefully. Are the three of you armed? I mean at this moment, on your person.”
“Negatory,” Abe said. “I just went to the airport, so I’m not packing.”
“I am,” Vic said. “Me too,” Stephanie chimed in.
Alphonse spoke very slowly and very precisely. “Tonya and Terry, I want you to take your sidearms out and give them to Agent Thomas.”
They all looked at each other, befuddled. Vic shrugged and did as Alphonse said. Stephanie complied as well.
“Okay, it’s done,” Vic affirmed.
“Agent Thomas?” Alphonse said.
“Yeah, I’ve got both the weapons.”
“Good. Take the safety off of one of them and chamber a round.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m very serious, Thomas. Do exactly as I say and be quick about it.”
Abe did as he was told. Stephanie and Vic exchanged concerned glances.
“Okay, it’s good to go.”
“Fine. Now Thomas, remember to do exactly as I say, as soon as I say it.”
“All right.”
“Thomas, point the gun at Agent Terry. Agent Terry, do not move.”
Stephanie blinked as Abe leveled the handgun at her. She sat as still as a statue.
“Agent Tonya, retrieve your firearm and do as Agent Thomas has done.”
Vic jumped up and moved across the room to where Abe was. She took her handgun back from him, turned off the safety, chambered a round, and pointed it at Stephanie grimly.
“Okay,” Vic said.
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 12