Colon saw the smoke column with his own eyes minutes after the helicopter lifted off from the ravaged town. The smoke stretched from the parched ground like a great black arm, reaching from the grave. The mummified warrior of this once fertile land had awakened, carrying a promise of rebirth with another ancient species, one from the stars. Looming just past the horizon were the cities that had defiantly sprung up in this inhospitable climate. The aliens would use the same force that had extinguished the life from this ground ages ago to annihilate its new inhabitants, and claim it for themselves.
The smoke spread for several miles through the desert. Colon couldn’t see much below. The view was completely obscured around Kilbourne Hole. Given the questionable air quality, he wouldn’t order the chopper lower for a better view.
A clear message rang in his head as he flew near the smoke. They’d kill him if he got anywhere near their territory.
Somehow, he didn’t think their land claim would end at this remote depression in the Earth.
As they flew over El Paso, a squadron of eight tanks emerged from the shadow of the Franklin Mountains as they rolled down Interstate 10. Motorists pulled to the side as a military jeep with flashing sirens and blaring horns cleared them out of the way. People stared out the windows of the downtown office buildings.
That might give the public a subtle hint something’s wrong.
He told the pilot to double back. They’d rendezvous on the large runway of Doña Ana County International Jetport, just west of El Paso on the New Mexico side. That way they could intercept the aliens before they invaded the cities, or TERU could launch an attack without civilians in their path. It was about 15 miles off road from Kilbourne Hole.
Colon’s tablet alerted him. The drone had a visual underneath the smoke cover. He brought up the live feed, and notified the secretary of defense.
Colon expected to see a bone-dry depression. Instead, he saw a lake. Kilbourne Hole was over a mile wide and greater than 300 feet deep. The entire expanse had been filled with water coming up about nine feet, and rising.
A desert oasis this wasn’t. The water had that sickly yellow tinge he remembered all too well from the Indian River Lagoon before they killed it. Shrubs on its edge withered and died from the fumes. The liquid bubbled and fizzed in spots. The camera zoomed in, showing prairie dogs and lizards getting dissolved in acid. Even those bred for the harshest terrain on Earth couldn’t survive this.
“They created their underwater habitat in the desert.” Colon rubbed the screen in disbelief. “And they did it virtually overnight. How’d I not see this?”
“Our satellites picked up some activity out here yesterday, but we didn’t pursue it,” Stronge said from the Pentagon. “Looked like illegal oil drilling. That wasn’t a priority with the aliens running around.”
“I bet that’s exactly what it looked like,” Colon said.
The drone operator flew around the north side of the maar lake, closer to the mound from the original eruption. At the source of the smoke arose an iron scaffold several stories tall with a long drill in the center accompanied by a fluid injection well. They both sat in the water, yet they didn’t dissolve. It was a classic fracking setup – pump fluid into the ground and force the gas and whatever else is down there to the surface.
“Are they fracking for natural gas out there?” Stronge asked. “What does that have to do with the lake?”
“I’m guessing they’re using heavy chemicals to put pressure on the ground water until it squeezes up through the hole,” Colon replied. “It’s like fracking in reverse.”
“But how’d they drill all the way down to the ground water? That has to be thousands of feet. That should have taken a month or longer.”
“I can’t explain it but to say it’s alien technology.” Rubbing his forehead, Colon glanced down at the city as a line of school buses dropped kids off. “At every turn, they act faster than we can react. They turned over 60 miles of the Indian River Lagoon toxic in the time it takes to cook an egg. Remember, they’re naturally acidic and acid is often used in mining.”
“Well, if they want to live in a hole in the ground, I say we make it a bigger hole. I’ll call in a missile strike. But first, have your drone destroy the fracking machines and cut off their water supply.”
“Yes, sir.”
The drone launched its first Hellfire missile at the scaffold. It detonated early, at least 15 feet above the target. The flames and debris from the blast rolled over a barely visible dome. In Florida, the aliens had extended an impenetrable barrier around a 90-plus mile lagoon, so providing the same protection for this maar would prove no challenge for them at all.
“Sons of bitches, they did it again!” Stronge said.
No sooner than he spoke, a rain shower whipped out of nowhere on the drone’s screen. The drops descended from the smoke clouds. They sizzled as they struck the drone’s camera. The picture grew fuzzy. One by one, its displays for altitude, speed and position fell off.
“Acid rain,” Colon said somberly as the meaning sunk in.
“Get our bird out of there.”
“Too late.” Colon watched the drone, now irresponsive, spiral towards the yellow water that nurtured one species, and dissolved another. It hit the barrier. The feed cut away.
As bad as the infected mutants were, Colon could fight them. How could he combat clouds of flesh-melting rain? With his helicopter on the descent to the airfield, Colon looked west at the black clouds gathering in the desert. Never had an impending storm been so ominous.
In the distance, he heard a school bell ring. He imagined the kids going out for recess and laughing as they splashed in the fresh puddles.
Colon drew a heavy breath. “We should evacuate every city in the region. I’m sure the CDC will agree. And we should tell Mexico to do the same.”
“That’s not feasible. Look at a map,” Stronge said. “Given that we don’t want them fleeing west or north into the storm, El Paso has three good escape roads. If you don’t want to send the people of Las Cruces to their deaths, they’ve got only two quality highways out. There’s no way we can funnel the population through those roads in time. I’d rather have them wait out the storm under thick roofs than stuck in traffic.”
The idea floating in Colon’s mind of evacuating the cities south through Mexico would be the most ironic migration of all time. Ciudad Juárez wouldn’t be any safer than El Paso and the roads out of there would be overloaded. Over 2 million people were as helpless as trailers in a tornado. Colon had plenty of guns, mortars and missiles, but you can’t shoot bad weather. Even if the homes survived the infected acid rain, the Rio Grande and the reservoirs wouldn’t. The region would be uninhabitable.
He couldn’t let those assholes do this on his watch again.
“Sir, I’m requesting permission to engage the enemy as soon as my forces are gathered,” Colon said.
“TERU is needed to defend the cities from a mutant incursion.”
“There is no saving people from infection once the rain delivers it into the water supply. Before it reaches the cities, we must eliminate their machine. They’re building that smoke cloud larger with every inch their lake grows. We must end this now.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm. I’d like to go in there guns blazing and blast them back to their side of the galaxy, but damn it, they have that shield up. Their habitat is surrounded by acid rain. What are you going to fight them with, a giant fan to blow the smoke away?”
“With your permission sir, I believe we can find a way around the barrier.” Colon leapt out of the helicopter and saluted the pilot. He headed straight for the first tank squadron. “We can send in our most heavily armored tanks. I’ll bunker with them and look for vulnerability in the shield. Since the maar is a steep depression, we could probably blast a hole at a 45 degree angle just outside the shield to create a tunnel. If that works, my troops will penetrate the enemy environment and terminate thei
r power source, the worm. If we can’t pass their shield, then perhaps killing one of their human leaders like Moni will weaken their defenses. It’s either that or sit here and watch people die. I won’t accept that any longer.”
With a heavy sigh, Stronge spit some curses away from the speaker. Colon heard him take a swig of something and guessed it wasn’t fruit juice.
“You want to go all John Wayne on me and ride out into the desert facing impossible odds?” Stronge asked. “You are a go. Burst that motherfucking bubble.”
68
Aaron lay in bed, his mind active yet his body trapped in a net of slumber. He dared not open his eyes for fear that he’d fully wake up. Why face a day like this?
He imagined what Moni was doing, to her skin, to her body. She probably hadn’t slept the whole time as she readied for war with the black cloud looming over civilization. Meanwhile, Aaron rested in this dark box of a room on a fold-out sofa bed while Ramona dozed on the twin-sized mattress – in their cocoon dangling on a tree with a chainsaw revving at its trunk.
A knock on the door forced his eyes open. To his amazement, the clock showed 5:26 – in the afternoon. Dr. Nunez must finally be ready for him. His back throbbed from stiffness as he rolled off the sofa.
Aaron shuffled quietly into the bedroom and checked on Ramona. She didn’t rise from her sleep. She’d somehow done a complete 180 from the position he laid her down in and tossed the covers on the floor. He’d have posted her photo online, but that might be a little creepy for a child that wasn’t his.
The banging on the door grew louder. Aaron didn’t think Nunez had that much oomph in her skinny arms. She must be pissed that he kept her waiting.
He answered the door to a familiar sight, but not the one he’d hoped for.
The dark purple lump on the FBI’s agent’s forehead had swollen the top half of his face like a rhino horn. Aaron tried to slam the door shut, but the agent jammed his boot in the way.
“Mr. Hughes, I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced. Cam Carter, FBI.”
Aaron stuttered as he gazed past the man to his accomplices. Nina Skillings, her face still scarred from her encounter way back in Melbourne, stood at one side lapping up every moment of this. Dr. Nunez shadowed them, avoiding eye contact.
“You don’t think who I am is important. I’m just a nameless government agent,” Carter said. “See, you didn’t ask my name before you did this to my face. You didn’t ask my name before you stole my car and left me to die in the invasion your girlfriend started.”
Skillings took a swift step toward Aaron. He flinched. Carter raised two fingers to halt her on command. The FBI man’s hand drifted down to his gun holster. He rested it there, making the point that at any moment he could end this conversation.
“I’m sincerely sorry about that,” said Aaron, his lower lip trembling. “It was nothing personal.”
“Is that what you’re going to tell the families of the innocent people who died last night in Columbus? It wasn’t personal?” Skillings asked.
Aaron bowed his head. His stomach groaned in revulsion. Not only had he failed to prevent this catastrophe, he’d led the aliens to their town. All of it had been to deliver Moni’s blood safely to this lab. The way Skillings glared at him – she saw him for what he was. He had become so obsessed with curing Moni, with liberating their love, that he had let the human race risk extinction.
“There’s nothing I can say that’ll make you understand what I’ve done,” Aaron said. “But I came back here, after the aliens tried to kill me too. I delivered the blood to Dr. Nunez because the aliens need to be stopped.”
“That’s exactly why we’re here,” Carter said. He turned to Nunez. She didn’t speak until he nodded his head on cue.
“I was hoping we could avoid this, but it wasn’t possible,” the lab director said with her hand clutching her cross necklace. “They showed up at my office a few hours after you arrived. The FBI has been aware of your presence here since we ran your social security number in the hiring process. I couldn’t lie to them, not with so many lives at stake.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to him,” Skillings said. “He sold out his own town. Hell, he let his last professor get eaten alive by the toxic lagoon. He’s the one who has to redeem himself to us.” She crossed her arms and flashed a razor-mouthed grin. “You’ve got your chance now surf rat.”
He gave her a puzzled look. Carter echoed Nina’s smile. Aaron didn’t like the looks of that. The law hounds parted and waved Nunez to the front. She held up a metal box. Aaron instinctively placed his hands on it. The box felt cool. Nunez undid the latch and opened it, revealing a loaded syringe.
“This is the best I could come up with on short notice,” Nunez said. “It’s a heavy concentration of the same enzymes in Moni’s bloodstream that counteract the infection from completely taking over. I’ve never seen anything like them before. Normally it would have taken weeks to produce this, but the enzymes multiplied like crazy inside our production vat. The problem is, I didn’t get a chance to test safe dosage levels.”
“So you’re saying?” Aaron asked.
“This might boost her resistance and remove the aliens from her.” Nunez took a step closer, looking him squarely in the eyes. “Or it might kill her.”
Aaron closed his eyes and shook his head. He should have expected such risks. It’s not as if they could have proper clinical trials for such a one-in-a-billion treatment. The first drug formulation is almost never correct.
Nunez continued. “If the medicine doesn’t cause her kidneys and liver to fail from overuse, Moni could still perish without the biological processes the aliens have introduced into her body. Most of the mutants in Florida died quickly after they lost the alien bacteria. The one example that has lasted longer, well, let’s say it’s not promising. Moni might have transformed too much to go back, but this is the best chance I can offer you today. Aaron...I know you love this woman. Look at me.”
Nunez took his hand. He felt the sweat on her palm as she stared into his eyes. He saw the compassion that she employed hundreds of times by bedsides of disease-stricken souls as she consoled their loved ones. “We only have today. If we don’t turn them back now, the people in this community won’t see a tomorrow.”
Aaron looked into the eyes of not just a scientist, but a woman with children, parents and friends in these cities. He thought of his parents, how they might have died if Moni hadn’t ended the invasion in the lagoon. Now it fell on him.
He shifted his gaze between the two officers. “You want me to give this to Moni. You think that’ll end it?”
“If the miracle drug works and she becomes a sickly human, we arrest her,” Skillings said in a glum voice. She smirked as she stated the alternative. “If Moni should sadly melt into a puddle like the vomit she is, even better. Either way, she won’t help the aliens any more. And we’ll know whether we should weaponize this, or use it as a cure.”
“You’re the only one who can get close enough to inject her, maybe even convince her to take it.” Carter pointed a gun at his ribs. “If you don’t--”
“No need for threats. I’m all in!” Aaron tried sounding enthusiastic so they wouldn’t handcuff him again. In reality, it terrified him risking the love of his life on the flip of a coin. He owed Moni the opportunity to choose.
Aaron kissed the sleeping Ramona on the forehead before he left. Nunez stayed behind in the faculty crash pad with the girl and promised she’d look after her. Aaron, his hands clasping the cold metal box, marched off between an even frostier Carter and Skillings.
“Before I do this, I’ve got to level with you,” Aaron said. Neither of them batted an eyelash at him as they escorted him to a black SUV just outside the building. “Disabling Moni won’t stop this fight. She’s not the one responsible for it. There’s at least one other possessed person. I saw him.”
Carter shrugged him off like a bothersome kid.
“Stop with this
innocence bullshit,” Skillings said. “There are no judges out where we’re going. There’s survival, there’s death and there’s the one thing worse than death, and that’s what your girlfriend is.”
69
The Lagoon Watcher had been sharing a couple of beers with Danny Riggs in his cabin while studying a map of the caves when the rickety table vibrated, nearly knocking their bottles over. A photo of Riggs’ dive team slipped off the wall, its glass cracking on the floor.
They rushed out the cabin door. A heavy industrial drill towered above the tree tops in the Peacock Springs sanctuary. Birds scattered as its twirling metal stake pierced the muddy soil and tore into ancient limestone.
“They’re raping the land!” Lagoon Watcher ran toward the drill with Riggs close behind.
The smell of burning oil tainted air that should be clear and natural. They’d plowed over turtle nests and snapped tree trucks to haul that hulking mining machine into the middle of a protected habitat.
Ten SEALs surrounded the dig site, standing on guard. Sand and chunks of limestone were piled haphazardly, like dirty boxer shorts in a college dorm. Leonard Ho stood beside Captain Roy Dobbs acting the stooge, not meeting Trainer’s eyes as he marched into the middle of the crime scene.
“This is a violation of our sacred soil!” Spittle flew from the Lagoon Watcher’s mouth and hit the captain on the chest. As the scientist waved his arms, Dobbs didn’t flinch. “I filed an injunction to block all heavy equipment from Peacock Springs. You can’t do this without a judge’s approval. I promise you this, no judge in good conscience would let you desecrate protected lands.”
“This spot is right over where you found traces of bacteria in the water. You’re drilling at least 45 feet down, I reckon,” said Riggs, who dressed the part of a university professor on a decade-long sabbatical. “You need a drilling permit. That never comes quick with the wheels of government.”
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