Ground Zero

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Carrera didn’t need to say a word to them. One guard stepped aside to let her pass. “Don’t worry,” she said to the man, “you’re on a short shift. Replacements are coming in a few minutes.” Then she gestured for Mulder and Scully to follow her as she ducked under the flimsy yellow tape.

  Scully wondered why the guards should be so concerned. Was it the simple superstition of being too close to a possible murder scene? These guards probably had very little outright crime to investigate, especially not violent crime like murder. She supposed the body hadn’t been removed yet, which would be very unusual.

  Down the hall beyond the yellow tape, all other offices stood empty, though their still-running computers and full bookshelves showed that the room had been occupied until recently. Coworkers of Dr. Emil Gregory’s? If so, they would have to be interviewed. No doubt all of the workers had been relocated, pending investigation of the accident.

  One office door, though, was tightly shut and sealed with more of the barrier tape. Rosabeth Carrera stood beside it and pulled off her laminated picture badge from which dangled a dosimeter and several keys. She searched for the key with the appropriate ID number and slipped it into the intimidating-looking lock in the doorknob.

  “Take a quick look,” she said, pushing the door open and simultaneously turning her face away. “This is just first glance. You’ve got two minutes.”

  Scully and Mulder stood beside each other at the threshold and peered inside.

  It looked as if an incendiary bomb had gone off in Dr. Gregory’s lab office.

  Every surface had been singed with a burst of heat so intense, yet so brief, it had curled and crisped the papers attached to Gregory’s bulletin board—but had not ignited them. His four computer terminals had melted at the edges and slumped in on themselves, the heavy glass cathode-ray tubes of the screens tilting cockeyed like the gaze of a dead man. Even the metal desks bowed and sagged from the brief molten weakness.

  An erasable white board had turned black, its enamel finish dark and blistered, though the colored trails of scrawled equations and notes left identifiable paths in the soot.

  Scully spotted Gregory’s body against the far wall. All that remained of the old weapons researcher was a horribly crisped scarecrow of a man. His arms and legs were drawn up from the contraction of muscles in intense heat, like some sort of insect sprayed with poison and curled up to die. His skin and the twisted rictus on his face made him look as if he had been doused with napalm.

  Mulder stared at the destruction in the room, while Scully focused on the corpse, her mouth partially open, her mind already set in that curious mixture of human horror and detached analysis she slipped into when inspecting a crime scene. The only way she could stave off her revulsion was to look for answers. She stepped forward.

  Before she could enter the room, though, Carrera placed a firm hand on her shoulder. “No, not yet,” she said. “You can’t go in there.”

  Mulder gave Carrera a sharp look, as if she had just pulled on his leash. “How are we supposed to investigate a crime scene if we can’t go inside?”

  Scully could tell that her partner’s interest had already been piqued. From what she could see at first glance she was going to have a hard time coming up with a simple, rational explanation for what had happened here in the sealed lab.

  “Too much residual radiation,” Carrera said. “You’ll need full contamination gear before you go inside.”

  Scully reflexively touched her dosimeter as she and Mulder both backed away from the door. “But according to your video briefing none of the labs supposed to contain dangerously high levels of radiation. Was that just government propaganda?”

  Carrera pulled the door shut again and favored Scully with a tolerant smile. “No, it’s true—under normal circumstances. But as you can see, things aren’t normal in Dr. Gregory’s lab. Nothing any of us can understand…not yet, anyway. There should not have been any radioactive material here; yet we found high levels of residual radiation in the walls, in the equipment.

  “But don’t worry, those thick concrete blocks shield us out here in the hall. Nothing to worry about—if you stay away from it. But you’ll need a much closer look. We’ll let you continue your investigation. Come on.”

  She turned, and they followed her down the corridor. “Let’s get you both suited up.”

  THREE

  Teller Nuclear Research Facility

  Tuesday, 11:21 A.M.

  The thick outfit made Mulder look like an astronaut. He found it difficult to move, but his eagerness to investigate the mysterious death of Dr. Emil Gregory convinced him to put up with the difficulties.

  Health-and-safety technicians adjusted the seams of his anticontamination suit, pulling the hood down over his head, fastening the zipper in back, then sealing it with another flap Velcroed over the top to keep chemical or radioactive residue from seeping through the seams.

  A transparent plastic faceplate allowed him to see, but condensation formed on the inside, and he tried to control his breathing. Canisters of compressed air on his back connected to a hood respirator that echoed in his ears and made it difficult to exhale. The joints in his knees and elbows ballooned as he tried to walk.

  Mulder felt detached from his surroundings, armored against the invisible threat of radiation. “I thought lead underwear went out of style with bell-bottoms.”

  Standing next to him, still clad in her stunning blouse and skirt, the dark beauty Rosabeth Carrera stood with her hands at her sides, looking uncertain as to what she should do. She had declined to suit up in anticontamination gear and accompany them onto the scene.

  “You’re free to go in and look around as much as you’d like,” Carrera said. “Meanwhile, I’ve arranged for the paperwork to allow you free access to the site—you’ll have a ‘need-to-know’ clearance for this case only. The Department of Energy and Teller Labs are eager to find out what caused Dr. Gregory’s death.”

  “What if they don’t like the answer?” Mulder said.

  Swathed in her own billowing hood in the anticontamination suit, Scully flashed him a warning look, one of the usual glances she gave him when he followed his penchant for blundering down a dangerous road.

  “Any answer’s better than nothing,” Carrera said. “Right now all we have are a bunch of disturbing questions.” She gestured up and down the hall where the offices of Gregory’s coresearchers had been sealed off. “The background radiation in the rest of this building is perfectly normal, except in Gregory’s office. We need you to find out what happened.”

  Scully asked, “I know this is a weapons research laboratory. Was Dr. Gregory working on anything dangerous? Anything that could have backfired on him? A prototype for a new weapons system perhaps?”

  Carrera crossed her arms over her small breasts and stood confident. “Dr. Gregory was working on computer simulations. He had no fissile material whatsoever in his lab, nothing that even remotely approached the destructive potential that we see here. Nothing at all deadly. The equipment was no more dangerous than a videogame.”

  “Ah, videogames,” Mulder said. “Could be the heart of our conspiracy.”

  Rosabeth Carrera gave them each a handheld radiation detector. The gadgets looked just like the kind Mulder had seen in dozens of 1950s B-movies of uncontrolled nuclear tests that accidently created mutations whose bizarreness was limited only by Hollywood’s meager special effects budgets of the era.

  One of the health-and-safety technicians gave them a quick briefing on how to use the radiation detector. The tech swept the sensor end up and down the hall, taking a sample of normal background readings. “Seems to be functioning properly,” he said. “I checked the calibration just a few hours ago.”

  “Let’s go inside, Mulder,” Scully said, standing at the door, obviously impatient to get to work.

  Carrera used the key on her badge again, pushing the lab door open. Mulder and Scully entered Dr. Gregory’s laboratory—and the radiation
detectors went wild.

  Mulder watched the needle dance high up on the gauge, though he didn’t hear the frying-bacon crackle of Geiger counters used so often in films. The silent needle’s signal was ominous enough.

  Within its concrete-block walls, this office had somehow been the site of an intense burst of radiation that had blistered the paint, seared the concrete, and melted the furniture. The flash had left residual and secondary radioactivity that still simmered, only fading gradually.

  Behind them Rosabeth Carrera closed the door.

  Mulder’s breathing resonated in his ears in the self-contained suit. It sounded as if someone were breathing down his neck, a long-fanged monster riding on his shoulder…but it was only echoes inside his hood. Claustrophobia hammered around him as he stepped deeper into the burned laboratory. Looking at the melted and flash-burned artifacts sent a shudder down his spine, tapping into his long-standing revulsion of fire.

  Scully went straight to the body, while Mulder stopped to inspect the heat-slumped computer terminals, the melted desks, the flash-burned papers on the bulletin board and on the work tables. “No indication of where the burst might have originated,” he said, poking around the debris.

  The walls were adorned with images of Pacific islands, aerial photos as well as computer printouts of weather maps of the ocean wind patterns, storm projections, and blistered black-and-white prints of weather satellite images—everything centered on the Western Pacific, just past the International Date Line.

  “Not the sort of stuff I’d expect a nuclear weapons researcher to collect on his office walls,” Mulder said.

  Scully bent over the scarecrowish burned body of Dr. Gregory. “If we can determine what he was working on, get some details of the weapons systems and any tests he was planning to run, we might come up with a more clear-cut explanation.”

  “Clear-cut, Scully?” Mulder said. “You surprise me.”

  “Think about it, Mulder. Despite what Ms. Carrera said, Dr. Gregory was a weapons researcher—what if he was working on some new high-energy burst weapon? It’s possible he had a prototype in here and he accidentally set it off. It could have flash-fried everything you see here, killed him…if it was just a small test model, its effect would be limited. It might not destroy the entire building.”

  “Good for us,” he said. “But look around—I don’t see the remains of any weapon, do you? Even if it exploded, there should be some evidence.”

  “We should still look into it,” Scully answered. “I need to take this body in for an autopsy. I’ll request that Ms. Carrera find us a local medical facility where I can work.”

  Mulder, preoccupied by Gregory’s bulletin board, reached out with a gloved hand to touch one of the curled papers still fastened by a slagged push pin to the crisped cork board. When he brushed the paper with his fingertips, it crumbled into ash, rippling away into the air. Nothing remained but a powdery residue.

  Mulder looked around for thick stacks of paper, hoping that something might have been left intact, like the photos on the walls. He searched Dr. Gregory’s desk for piles of technical reports or journal articles, but found nothing. Then he noticed the unburned rectangular marks on the charred desktop.

  “Hey, Scully, look at this,” he said. When she came over, he pointed to the pale rectangular patches. “I think there must have been documents here, reports left on top of his desk—but somebody’s removed the evidence.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” Scully said. “The reports themselves probably still have significant residual radioactivity—”

  Mulder met her gaze through the thin faceplates on their hoods. “I think somebody’s trying to do us a favor. They’ve ‘sanitized’ the murder scene to protect us from classified information that maybe we shouldn’t be seeing. For our own good, of course.”

  “Mulder, how can we possibly expect to solve this if the crime scene has been tampered with? We don’t have the complete picture here.”

  “My feeling exactly,” he said.

  He knelt to look at Dr. Gregory’s two-shelved metal credenza. It was filled with physics textbooks, computer-code user’s manuals, a copy of Lagrangian-Eulerian Hydrocode Dynamics, and straightforward geography and physics texts. The bindings were burned and blackened, but the rest of the books remained intact.

  He looked at the burn marks on the shelves themselves. As he had expected, several books had been removed as well. “Somebody wants a quick answer to this, Scully,” he said. “A simple answer. One that doesn’t require us to have all the information.”

  He looked toward the closed lab door. “I think we should inspect each of these other offices down the corridor, too. If they’re the offices of Dr. Gregory’s project team, somebody might have forgotten to yank out the information that was carefully deleted from this scene.”

  He went back to the bulletin board and touched another piece of the crumbling paper. The ash flaked off, but he was able to distinguish two words before it disintegrated.

  Bright Anvil.

  FOUR

  Veteran’s Memorial Hospital,

  Oakland, California

  Tuesday, 3:27 P.M.

  The safety technicians and radiation specialists at the Teller Nuclear Research Facility had assured Scully that any residual radiation in Dr. Emil Gregory’s corpse remained low enough to pose no significant safety hazards. Scully found it faintly amusing that none of the other doctors in the hospital wanted to be with her in the special autopsy room they had prepared.

  She was a medical doctor and had performed many autopsies, but she preferred working alone—especially in a case as disturbing as this one.

  She had dissected corpses in front of her students at the Quantico FBI Training Facility many times, but the condition of Dr. Gregory’s body, the specter of a radioactive disaster, bothered her enough on a gut level that she was glad she could think her own thoughts and not be distracted by questions or perhaps even rude jokes from the new students.

  Rather than providing general autopsy facilities, the Veterans Memorial Hospital had placed her in a little-used room especially reserved for severely virulent diseases, such as strange tropical plagues or unexpected mutations of the flu. But the room had what she needed. Scully stood in front of Gregory’s body. She tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. She should get to work.

  She had performed more autopsies than she could remember, on bodies in far worse condition than this burned husk of an old man. But the thought of how Dr. Gregory had died brought back the nightmares she had suffered while in her first year of college at Berkeley: grim and depressing imaginings of the world’s dark nuclear future. She had awakened to thoughts of these horrors in the middle of the night in her dorm room. By day she had read the propaganda slogans, the overblown antinuclear brochures designed to foster fear of the atom.

  Before this autopsy, she had reviewed medical texts, concise and analytical treatments that avoided the imflammatory descriptions of radiation burns. She was ready.

  Scully drew a long, deep breath through the respirator mask. The dual air-filtering cartridges hung heavily from her face, like insectoid mandibles. She wore goggles as well, to keep any of the cadaver’s fluids from spraying into her eyes. She had been assured that this simple protective clothing would be sufficient against the low radiation levels in Dr. Gregory’s body, but she thought she could feel invisible contamination like gnats on her skin. She wanted to hurry and get this over with, but she was having a hard time getting started.

  Scully inspected the surgical implements on the tray next to her autopsy table, but it was merely a stalling tactic. She chided herself for avoiding the corpse. After all, she thought, the sooner she got to it, the sooner she could be finished and out of there.

  At the moment, though, she would much rather have been with Mulder interviewing some of Dr. Gregory’s fellow scientists—but this was her job, her specialty.

  She switched on the tape recorder, wondering if the radiation seepi
ng out of the body might affect the magnetic tape. She hoped not.

  “Subject: Emil Gregory. Male Caucasian, seventy-two years of age,” she dictated. Curved mirrors reflected the harsh white fluorescents overhead down onto the table. These, along with the surgical lamps, washed away all shadows, allowing no secrets to be hidden.

  Gregory’s skin was blackened and peeling, his face shriveled to a burned mask over his skull. White teeth poked through the split and charred lips. His arms and legs had been drawn up, folded together as his muscles contracted with the heat. She touched him with one heavily gloved finger. Flakes of burnt flesh fell off. She swallowed.

  “Apparent cause of death is sudden exposure to extreme heat. However, other than the several external layers of complete charring…” she nudged the burnt layers that peeled away, revealing red, wet tissues underneath “…the musculature and internal organs appear relatively intact.

  “There are some indications of the damage normally seen when a victim dies in a fire, but other indicators are missing. In a normal fire, body temperature rises throughout, causing extreme damage to internal organs, massive trauma to the entire bodily structure, rupture of soft tissues. However, in this case it appears that the heat was so intense and so brief that it incinerated the subject’s exterior, but dissipated before it had time to penetrate more deeply into his body structure.”

  After finishing with her preliminary summary, Scully inspected the tray and took a large scalpel, holding it clumsily in her gloved hands. When she cut into Dr. Gregory’s body cavity, the sensation was like sawing through a well-done steak.

  In the background the Geiger counters clicked with stray bursts of background radiation, sounding like sharp fingernails tapping on a window pane. Scully froze, waiting until the counts died down.