Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

  “What is it, Joe? I can’t see anything,” Lanza said.

  “Paddle hard, damnit!” I shouted. “Hard, damn you!”

  Just then, a ray of sunlight glinted off the green water. A tiny hint of greenish vapor wafted off the water. I held my breath. The boat rocked as Lanza spotted the cloud and recoiled, boat lurching, then slapped at the water with his own paddle.

  I watched in terror as the green water passed within a foot of the side of the canoe. But our vessel broke free and jerked quicker and quicker from the billowing streams of jade. In moments we were yards away from it, cruising toward the bank.

  Soon we were out of reach of the spreading cloud, but we paddled harder and harder, arms aching, terrified adrenaline driving us onward. We reached the shore and scrambled out into the water, splashing, dragging the canoe up frantically onto land.

  “What in the motherfucking…cocksucking…hell…was that?” Lanza said, breathless, fumbling the rods and tackle.

  Looming across the water, we saw the green mass reflected in the sunlight like an enormous plug of floating mucus. Smoke hovered on the water. A long plume stretched downstream, but I saw the biggest cloud was headed toward the opposite shore. And from this side of the bank, I watched it flow straight at the green intake pipe.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you’ve got to report this. It’s going toward that Bureau intake. Whatever it is, it’s going to kill somebody.”

  We threw the fishing tackle in the back of the truck. I stole glances at the glowing cloud, which shrank quickly at the intake. How did a chemical travel upstream? I thought about the warning label on the pipe and my stomach bottomed out. We got in the car. Dialing with shaky hands, I called the emergency number from the green intake I’d memorized—but there was a busy signal. Lanza picked up his Atman, and it beeped loudly. He held it up to his ear.

  “Chief, I was just about to call. You’re not going to believe—”

  But he stopped short. His eyes grew wide. He nodded.

  “Affirmative,” he said with finality. The thing beeped again. He placed it on the dash.

  “What was that about?”

  “A plane crashed into a school,” Lanza said, grim-faced, putting the truck in reverse. “I couldn’t really understand him, but he said something about green smoke everywhere.”

  “Green smoke,” I said, looking out over the river. “The drones…”

  Lanza took a cigarette from the center console and lit it. The sensor began to beep, but Lanza clubbed the dashboard with a heavy hand, and it stopped. We peeled out. The truck bounded along the rutted road, and then we were on the smooth ultrahighway, speeding east.

  “I need to get right over to that school,” Lanza said. “I don’t have time to drop you off.”

  “That’s fine—I’ll stay in the truck,” I said.

  “You better, or I’ll have to arrest you,” Lanza said.

  “You’d better radio in that green stuff on the river, too,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Who cares about some green shit in the river, when there are kids burning alive in a school?”

  We drove in silence, except for the dashboard’s insistent smoke alarm.

  “When we get there, you have to promise me you’ll stay in the car,” Lanza said, as they took the exit. “You can’t do anything stupid. No doctor playing detective, that kind of shit.”

  Lanza reached into the console, pulled out a small black Glock, and laid it on the dash.

  “You’ve got it,” I said.

  But I was lying.

  SCHOOL DAZE

  U.S.A., 2087

  The SallyAnn Salsano Elementary School was a two-story brick building atop a little hill, surrounded by quaint streets of old colonial houses, all built after smallpox had killed off the Lenni Lenape tribes in the area centuries earlier. The neighborhood was a few miles from my house—it was the school where I believed my unborn child would someday learn to read and count.

  The pickup truck pulled into the row of handicapped spots in front of the school. Emergency plans were already in effect. A line of students marched away from the building, hands on the shoulders of the one in front of them. The young faces were tear-streaked, the mouths open as they howled in terror. They reminded me of the horror of the little naked girl I’d seen in the Old Man’s ancient history book. But this horror was multiplied, manifold. The heads kept bobbing by: little freckled cheeks, dimples, girls with curly hair, and boys with cowlicked crew cuts. Several wore T-shirts with the image of Joe Steelman emblazoned on the front. Among them walked bigger figures in stark-white NBC suits and gas masks. A few of these pallid forms patted the kids on their heads, reassuring them there everything was normal, there was nothing to fear, as their school burned. I almost laughed as they stooped down in their alien-looking suits and tried to assuage wide-eyed fears with big, scary faces shaped like anteaters from hell. The last few kids along the evacuation route lagged far behind the others, staggering sporadically, punching at their Atmans, seemingly oblivious to the pandemonium. I sighed.

  With a roar, flames punched through the roof, flinging tiles and shingles down to the ground. I saw then that the air over the school seemed to ripple in mirage from the heat, and a greenish haze seemed to hang, mixing with the black smoke. The line of kids wasn’t the only part of the evacuation. Throngs of teachers and janitors streamed off in every direction away from the school, toward every side street putting them at a distance from the burning destruction. Far off at the northwestern corner of the school, more white figures clustered around a tent.

  “I guess they were ready for this,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Lanza said, shoving his gun down the back of his jeans.

  “Think about it. We saw the plane fly over, we saw the green plume in the river, you got the call, we came here. It’s been less than a half hour. They’ve already set up the biohazard tent, the full disaster response. It’s almost like they had everything prepared ahead of time.”

  “I guess it’s a testament to the planning of the Saint Almachius staff,” Lanza said.

  I scoffed.

  “The hospital is the lead agency? Why not the Bureau of Wellness?”

  “My chief doesn’t tell me any of that kind of stuff,” Lanza said. “Just stay in the car. Since you’re not a hospital employee anymore, you can’t technically be here.”

  “They might need help with the victims,” I said.

  “They’ll be fine. You have other things to worry about. Like getting that dossier back from the reporter. Getting your life back on track. Being arrested at an active disaster scene won’t help you or Mary or the kid. So sit tight.”

  I just nodded. Lanza narrowed his stare at me for a second. But then he turned and walked purposefully toward the school, the loosened straps on his fishing hip boots jangling like spurs. I watched him walk down the sidewalk, toward the flashing lights of the cop cars.

  Once my friend was out of sight, I leapt out of the truck and strode toward the big tent. As I approached, the white-suited figures brought boxes and gear out of the front flap. My mind cycled through things I could say if I was suddenly confronted by one of those gasmasked faces. I might say I was a doctor at Saint Almachius, but anyone would recognize me and know I had been suspended. I could explain I had arrived with the police, but I didn’t have a badge. I could just force my way past, saying I was a Bureau of Wellness administrator doing a spot check. All were bullshit stories, but I decided upon this last course as my best bet. It was just farfetched enough to work.

  Just as I approached, a suited figure lugged a big plastic baggy containing some viscous green glop out of the tent. The person stopped at my approach. My breath caught in my chest. I nodded sternly at the figure. The person paused for a second but, just as I neared, stepped aside and vanished around the corner.

  No one inside. The mobile-operations post was set up the same as at the plague outbreak: the three cubicles set up for equipment, staging, and triag
e. I paused for a second, and then headed straight for the equipment locker. Stark white NBC suits were stacked neatly there. I grabbed one and quickly pulled it on, around my body and over my head. These were bulkier and heavier—they felt like armor as much as biohazard protection wear. I triple-checked the fitting, and while I was doing so, two people walked in. The muffled voice of the shorter one was unmistakably Betty Bathory, carrying her bullhorn with a regal kink to her wrist. I nearly froze but busied my hands. The other suited figure was talking to her, mumbling a muted protest of some kind, but she shook her head, denying the person whatever it was. The talking stopped. Her head swiveled in my direction.

  “Sergeant, why aren’t you out there inspecting the wreckage?” she barked.

  Sergeant? Baffled, I glanced through the mask’s visor down at my shoulder and saw distinct military chevrons on the white material. Betty clapped her hands and barked some kind of order. I gave her half a salute and ducked outside.

  Within my heavy mask, the scene was unearthly—sight constricted, sounds smothered, face nearly smothered by plastic. A group of white figures huddled around a generator which chugged, spewing smoke. Another cluster of the suits yelled at one another, gesturing madly. I gave them a wide berth and trudged toward the side of the school. I stepped like a man on the moon, slow and cautious, toward a closed door. I saluted a pair of passing soldiers with assault rifles on their shoulders. I passed them with gritted teeth and moved on.

  I shook my head in the enormous suit and glanced around the schoolyard. Why was the military working with the hospital at a plane crash? What did it have to do with the Bureau? The federal agency avoided entanglements, ever since the Purge. Something was different this time.

  I grasped the handle of the school door. With a quick tug, it opened.

  The inside was dark, lit only by weak sunlight from an old corner window. It was a small antechamber before the school gymnasium to my right. I walked along the marble floor to the entryway ahead and shoved at the handle. It gave.

  Smoke rushed at me. I stepped inside, shut the doors behind, and clicked on the miner’s headlamp in the suit. Sweeping it back and forth in front of me, shapes of stacked desks and flashes of neon children’s drawings on glowing screens along the walls emerged from the gloom. The haze was green in my little beam of light. I stepped cautiously forward, expecting the shadows to leap out at me at any moment.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, I told myself. Rushing into a burning building with soldiers swarming all around. Without a medical license, I’d end up in jail this time—or shot on sight, I thought. Sweat beaded on my brow, my bladder felt full. But I kept going.

  Doors appeared on both sides of the hallway. I peered in to each classroom window with the light, little desks and chairs and blackboards frozen in the weak rays from the tinted windows in each room. They reminded me of Mrs. Bopp’s classroom from a lifetime before. Except everything seemed impossibly tiny, the desks coming up just over my knee. And things were missing—no bookshelves, no papers or crayons or pencils like we still had in school when I was a kid. Instead, there were little Atmans on each desk, screens glowing eerily in the dark since their users had fled their desks in panic.

  I walked farther down the hall, scanning each classroom for a second, then moving on. The arches of the main office in the center of the building opened on my left, a few sunbeams casting hard angled shadows across the hallway. The clerical offices were empty and quiet too, except for one computer, beeping continually. A few more classrooms were just as empty. I came to a door marked as a library, and next to it, the stairwell to the second floor.

  The library was empty. A sweep of my headlamp showed white walls bare up to the high ceilings, broken only by holographic images every few feet: animated scenes of fantastical swordfights, kisses of princesses bestowed on their rescuers, drone strikes on a cluster of tents in a desert during the Tenth Crusade. Rows of low desks with computer monitors blinked out of sync with one another. The scene was bizarre, a place I never would have recognized without the sign on the door. I turned back and went out to the hallway.

  Lights bounced and swung at the far end of the hall. A half dozen white figures approached. Voices barked military orders. I cupped my hand over my own light and retreated through the door to the stairwell heading up.

  The smoke thickened. The green mist swirled around me, and I felt some kind of pulsing energy above. Hairs on my neck stood on end. I climbed. Sweat trickled down my eyebrows, tumbled to my cheeks and neck. The heat intensified. The doors at the top of the stairs were splintered in dozens of pieces of glass, each reflecting the flickering flames within. I pushed through the door gingerly, kicking aside some of the bigger shards.

  The second-floor hallway had imploded, it seemed. The walls had crumbled into mounds of sheetrock and pebbles. No appreciable architecture stood after forty yards. I took cautious steps forward, trying to visually dissect what I was seeing. At the far end of the rubble, I made out the triangular shape of a drone’s tail rudder. The flames were hottest around it, but they were no ordinary flames—they were sparkling, twisting emeralds. The air thickened with green particles at each step forward. Even within my protective membrane, my skin crawled.

  Survivors—survivors and victims were the objective. I took a deep breath. I had to find the people inside, if there were any, and carry them away from the disaster. The possibility of dead children in the debris had become real. I sucked in the suit’s sterile air and stepped forward.

  Three classrooms stood between me and the awful slide of rubble. I scanned the first and second. Both were dark, their windows covered by soot. The floors were covered with debris and garbage, but the walls and desks were somehow intact, untouched by the fire and the plane’s explosive impact. I crossed the hallway to the third classroom’s open door and peered inside.

  I gasped.

  A figure in an NBC suit stood over two tiny figures who sat against the wall. I was about to call out, but something in their postures stopped me. The seated people were kids, arms crossed over their heads.

  It took a second to see the restraints around their little wrists. I held my breath. I had to do something.

  I stepped closer, edging around glass shards underfoot. The suited figure, indistinct through the green haze, loomed over the children. He stared down at some device in his hand, bigger than an Atman, waving it all around, like he was measuring something in the air. I heard a voice, a man’s guttural rumblings under the crackling of the flames and the falling of debris and the zap-pop of live wires. It sounded like an incantation, something religious. I stepped closer. Then the figure’s words became clear.

  “…levels are slightly elevated. Contagion not yet spread to Meruda,” he said. “Subjects restrained. Estimated time of transmission anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes.”

  I went closer. The two kids appeared to be in some kind of drugged stupor, as they wriggled and coughed. Their eyes were shut.

  “Subjects appear to be half-conscious at minute twenty-eight, which will make test controls easier,” said the man.

  The voice suddenly sounded so familiar, so serious.

  I took one more step forward. Something beeped.

  “Readings of the agent are now elevated…” the man said, his voice rising.

  Another step. But I didn’t look down this time, and my foot came down on something that went pop, then crunch—a lightbulb. I froze. The man kept punching numbers into his device, recording his data, oblivious. He had heard nothing over the roar of the flames.

  But one of the kids—a little blond boy—had heard. He raised his head and opened his eyes. They glimmered like jade in the light. The boy stared. He opened his mouth as if to say something, maybe to scream at what he probably believed to be another tormentor. The boy tugged on his restraints. I waved at him frantically to be quiet, but it was too late. The restraints made a sharp sound in his struggles, and the man in the NBC suit looked up and then spun around at me, hand gra
sping a black gun holster at his side.

  “Sergeant, this is an isolated Bureau of Wellness study area,” the man ordered. “Show me your credentials.”

  That voice. I knew this man, from somewhere. But I didn’t dare move. The man’s gloved hand tugged at the holster—but he couldn’t unsnap the clasp with the thick latex gloves.

  At that split second, without a thought, I rushed forward. I angled my shoulder low and hard into the man’s center of gravity and slammed into him. The man toppled, legs splayed out over a low desk next to the wall. But still he struggled to rise, still tugging at the gun in the holster. I bullrushed him with my shoulder again, smashing his head against the wall, bowling him over to the side. The figure was still trying to rise. I stooped down and slammed the man’s head against the concrete once, then again, and he went limp.

  I stood over him. I looked down at my hands, wondering what I had done, whether I had killed him. But it was self-defense. I couldn’t tell who the person was, whether it was a Saint Almachius employee or some rogue researcher who tied kids up in a burning building contaminated with biohazards. The vinyl visor was tinted, and it was impossible to see the face inside. I could rip off the protective suit. But I knew that patrol was coming, and it would take time I didn’t have. I went over to the kids, loosened the restraints, and lifted them to their feet.

  “Don’t worry, we’re going to get you out of here,” I told them.

  They weren’t drugged at all—they broke out into terrified sobs as I ushered them out of the classroom. Once we hit the stairwell, the one in front ran off down the stairs. The other one—the smaller, blond boy—stuck close to me, a bit wobbly over the debris. I steadied him with a hand on his shoulder and held the door open for him at the bottom. A thought hit me.

  “Is your name Meruda?” I asked.

  The boy looked up at me with a blank stare and shook his head. I ushered him through the doorway. As the kid went through, I noticed something stuck to the collar of his shirt. It was a piece of paper. I peeled it off, turned it over in my hands. It was a label.