by Stephen Moss
It would never occur to him or his wife that the pastor was just trying to profit out of the misery of others by selling more of his trite products. Or that if the man that claimed to be a shepherd believed anything his god had ever said he would be telling his flock that they should be giving their money to the victims of the terrible disaster on the Eastern seaboard, and not to his parasitic ministry.
But this pastor had a new CD out and he needed to move the vast stocks he had paid the printers in China to ship to him. His followers were there to provide him an income, their misguided faith in him and the platitudes he preached leading them to sacrifice their menial disposable income like lambs to his ethical slaughterhouse.
After a while, Jason’s wife stood, groaning as she levered her rotund frame out of their plush La-Z-Boy couch, and headed to the trailer’s commode, farting as she went. Like a child spotting a forbidden treat, Jason took the opportunity to claim the remote control, and with a satisfied grin he changed the channel to where he knew reruns of Cops should be playing. But they weren’t. Instead, another special report on the events in southern Georgia was looping here as well and Jason cursed.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
A shout came through the thin wall between him and the toilet. “Damn it, Jason, don’t take the Lord’s fuckin’ name in vain,” admonished Jason’s wife, Theresa. Unfortunately, the strain of her shout forced out a particularly loud and potent fart, and after a moment they both started laughing.
The reporter on the television was showing one of many sites outside Atlanta where tens of thousands of people were being put up in temporary housing set up by the National Guard. They represented only a fraction of the millions who were being displaced by the disaster, but the sight was sobering even for Jason, and his laughter faded as he took it in.
“Damn,” he said quietly, as the woman on the TV explained the extent of the evacuation.
“This site, which is one of fifteen outside Atlanta, is estimated to house nearly ten thousand people, a number which has been growing every day in the week since the disaster. As you saw when I spoke with the camp’s coordinator, Colonel McAvoy, the biggest problem at this point has been security, keeping the belongings people have insisted on bringing with them safe, even though it is taking away from the space left for other refugees. But this camp is up and running now, and nearly full. And as they complete others like it from Alabama to Pennsylvania, the question has become not where will these people go, but how long they will have to stay here before they can return home?”
The reporter went on with her explanation and Jason sat, enthralled by the sheer scale of the spectacle. Theresa emerged from the toilet, her Duck Dynasty sweatpants still down around her ankles, while she pulled up her sweatshirt so she could pull her pants up over her potbelly. But she paused with her hefty midriff and well-worn thong exposed when she noticed her husband’s intent expression. He sensed her scrutiny and said in an aside, “This shit is unreal, Terry. They’ve, like, totally evacuated the entire coast of Georgia and the Carolinas just like they said they would. I mean, this shit is really happening. I can’t believe it.”
She turned to face the screen, her panties and belly still showing as her limited attention span was absorbed by the images. The view had shifted to a CGI map of the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Overlaying it was a large grey arrow moving north from the coastal border between Georgia and Florida, up the coast all the way to southern Virginia. Its root was the King’s Bay Naval Base, where a massive explosion a week beforehand had incinerated two Ohio class nuclear submarines, laying open their radioactive cores and warheads to the North Atlantic trade winds.
In a massive evacuation, the coastal population that lived in the cloud’s path had been driven and cajoled out of their homes, assisted by school buses, military trucks, and the conversion of every highway in the area into one-way, six-lane floods of exodus. But many of them had not escaped its effects in time. Many were even now showing varying levels of radiation sickness: hair loss, lethargy, the many symptoms of overexposure to the weapons-grade plutonium dust that was irradiating everything in the cloud’s wake.
The scale of the area it now covered combined with the half-life of the material was already diminishing the cloud’s effects to some degree as it came to southern Maryland and Delaware, but unseen tumors were already blossoming in thousands of innocent bodies as they sat in traffic or settled into tents, football stadiums, and school gymnasiums, unaware of the embryonic death starting take root inside them.
Theresa eventually finished pulling up her sweatpants and sank slowly into the La-Z-Boy next to Jason, her eyes locked on the screen as the scale of the disaster hit her as well.
“You know, Sara-Beth told me they’re setting up one of those refugee camps over at the Sharp’s Farm, right here, in Slocomb,” she said, an effort to seem open-minded not disguising the air of disgust in her voice. Jason and Theresa lived in a trailer. They had always lived in a trailer. Theresa’s sister and two cousins lived in another trailer in the same park. Heading to one of the camps might actually be a move up in the world for some of their neighbors. At least they would have running hot water.
Jason picked up on her tone and reacted, “Terry, these folks have it real shitty. Surely you’re not gonna begrudge some of ’em comin’ to Slocomb?”
“Yeah, I’ll begrudge the fuckers comin’,” she replied, turning her head sharply to him, “These snooty fuckers sure-as-shit wouldn’t put us up if this shit happened in Alabama.”
“Hey, these aren’t all rich folk, some of ’em are good Christian folk like us.” he replied.
“Christian? They’re nothin’ but a bunch of liberal, pansy-ass, anti-American motherfuckers, and there ain’t one single real fuckin’ Christian among ’em. I don’t care if they all die out there, I don’t want them in ’bama, freeloadin’ off of us hard-workin’ real Americans.”
Their argument continued, their raised voices blending with the mixed aroma of Cheetos and methane floating out the window, along with the irony of the fact that neither of these two hard workers had held a steady job in ten years. Outside their trailer, the mix of TV chatter and inane conversation could be heard from a hundred other trailers just like Jason and Theresa’s, the clamor settling on the humid night air. But amongst the banal repetitiveness of their surroundings, Jason and Theresa’s home was, in fact, quite unique.
For, unknown to them, a dark presence lay in silence underneath it. Amongst the pipes and trash and poorly connected wiring, lay a black figure. Blacker than the shadow that enveloped her. She was perfectly still, perfectly silent. Only the whites of her eyes betrayed any movement at all. She had been present at the explosions in King’s Bay. In fact, she had been the cause of the death spreading up the coast. But the massive fireball that had ripped the two subs apart had also flayed off her synthetic skin, leaving her black battle armor exposed beneath.
Agent Lana Wilson lay in the darkness, amongst food wrappers and used tires, with a rage boiling inside her. Her systems were slowly repairing themselves after the massive damage she had suffered, but it would take time. With nothing to do while she recuperated, she had taken to putting her mind in a kind of machine hibernation, relying on a subroutine to monitor her surroundings while she ‘slept’ away the days.
Each night she awoke, reviewed her status, and briefly reviewed the bits and pieces of information her brain had stored away during the day. The system’s status was relatively unchanged. Her weapons were semi-functional again; the laser systems almost fully repaired, while the more delicate sonic punch was only a week away from operational readiness. But those were not the systems that had been most affected. To put it bluntly, she had been stripped bare of every external sensor and apparatus on her body. Everything had been wiped clean down to the black superconducting shielding that lay beneath all the Agents’ skins.
She could repair many of those lost senses. But her fake earlobes were gone, along with her ha
ir, leaving her head smooth and featureless. She could rebuild the infinitesimal radar arrays and audio receptors that had been built into her ocular cavities, so she would be able to hear and interact with her surroundings again, but the woven, chameleon skin that had allowed her to blend in with the humans was gone forever. A gash or tear in the skin would have repaired itself with time, but the loss of the entire structure was like the loss of an entire limb, and even her extensive regenerative systems could not rebuild it.
There was a factory, unbeknownst to her, where the human conspiracy that had orchestrated the death of the satellites had built a resonance manipulator, a machine capable of rebuilding even her dermal systems. But she did not even know of its existence, let alone its location, so as far as she was concerned, nothing on Earth could replace the main tool of her disguise. So she had become as black outwardly as the dark purpose that simmered within her. And she would stay that way.
It would limit her movements, hinder her as it forced her into the shadows, but her plans now would have made blending in difficult at best anyway. For her mind was set. She was going to find them, the conspirators, the people that had launched the missiles that had destroyed her precious satellites, the people that had created the antigen that had saved humanity. She was going to find every one of them, starting with Neal Danielson and Madeline Cavanagh, and she was going to kill them all … slowly.
Chapter 3: Triptych
In a wide room at the center of a large building sheltered within a massive compound, a center of thought was forming. The room was an office, still embryonic in its layout and systems. It was a new office. As new as the newly created governmental position its occupant had been appointed to.
Two large windows, each adjacent, filled its one outside wall. The other walls were blank, bereft of the accumulated pictures and paraphernalia that typically adorned offices this large, the attempts by their occupants to make their workspaces seem like a home or to give them the air of prestige they assume befits their lofty rank. But this office lacked the history it would have needed to form a homely feel and its occupant lacked the arrogance that would have led him to drape icons on his walls to impress his visitors.
But he had an arrogance of sorts. He believed he was one of the main reasons that the single greatest danger in the history of Earth had been discovered in time to do something about it. And he was right. Because of that fact, the man who only two years ago had been a lonely and lowly researcher in a neglected field now found himself the appointed head of an international taskforce with an unprecedented mandate.
For with the help of a diverse team of scientists, air force and naval officers, and three agents with wildly different backgrounds, Dr. Neal Danielson had been tasked with preparing for the arrival of a force more powerful than any imagined in earth’s long, bloody history. An Armada that wanted only the eradication of humanity so that it could claim that most precious of commodities in all the galaxy: a life-sustaining planet, irrespective of the life it was already sustaining.
Neal sat at his desk and tried to focus his thoughts. A thousand different aspects of his task whirled about in his head like feathers in a whirlwind, illusive and possessed, but he knew that in order to construct some meaningful seed of a plan he must grasp each and every one of them and focus on it. On its particular implications, on its particular attributes, and how to fit it into the wing that he must form, the wing upon which Earth’s defense must fly.
The task of identifying and codifying all of the component parts of the plan they must form was gargantuan in and of itself, but the doctorate student in Neal knew that he must work piece by piece, taking one aspect and building from there. He would never sleep unless he started to think of it all in manageable segments.
So he plucked a thought and centered on it, choosing to start with the subject of his next meeting. He would start with the macro, the leadership; on how he was going to frame the team he was building. Before he could build the larger army, Neal knew he must surround himself with capable and trustworthy lieutenants, starting with those who had shared the first perilous stage of their long journey. Most had already been corralled, but three of them remained unaccounted for: Shahim, Jack, and Martin.
As if summoned by his thoughts of his friends, a knock on the door came and two men walked in, each of them a part of that same auspicious group.
“Gentlemen!” said Neal, rising to greet the men. The first man was Agent John Hunt, any mark of his incarceration now completely banished from his tall, strong frame and boyish face, as he returned Neal’s handshake with a smile. Neal turned to the second man with a special affection born of deep mutual respect, a respect that had been hard earned between people from very different backgrounds, and who had made up very different but equally crucial parts of their diverse conspiracy.
Neal allowed a broad grin to spread across his lips as he reached up to finger the new stars adorning the general’s lapel, a liberty very few could have taken with the stern-looking air force officer. But the seeming affront was only met with a roll of the deep blue eyes in the rugged man’s face as he turned briskly away and went to the conference table that took up one-third of the large office, laying a sheaf of papers and a laptop case on top of it.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” said General Barrett Milton. “As you asked, we’ve been working on refining the teaming structure we’re going to need, working on three key branches: Research, Construction, and Execution.” The other two men came and joined him around the table as he spoke, remaining standing as they looked at the organization charts Barrett was spreading out. Neal recognized the brisk perfection of John’s machine hand in the crisp lines and words on the charts, one of the Agent’s many talents.
“Let’s start with first: the Research Team will focus on the design and development of the array of tools we will need for the various main milestones for our preparations which we are even now laying out. Eventually they will refocus on the designs of the machinery that will make up our planetary defenses. But we are a ways off from that yet.
“The Construction Team, meanwhile, will focus on the location and allocation of the extensive resources we are going to require, and the construction efforts that will eventually be undertaken, both here on earth and …” he paused as the next words eased themselves from his lips, “… in orbit.”
They were all keenly aware that this effort was going to lift humanity on to a new technological plane, the gifts of knowledge that Agent John Hunt was bestowing upon them were the products of many decades of research by his own people, and they would represent an evolutionary leap for us. But every now and then some simple concept brought reality home, and the thought of how much of the coming battle was going to be waged in space was one of those concepts.
“Finally, the Operations Group will be the military branch, that will eventually encompass the various land-based, orbital, and exo-orbital defensive bodies that will be trained to man the defenses the other two teams will be designing and constructing. Now, clearly these three teams are working on very different timelines, and no doubt one or the other will take center stage as the next few years progress, but to some extent we thought we should start considering all their component parts now in order to plan accordingly.”
Neal nodded but offered up a point, “What about oversight, management … politicians?”
General Milton winced, then nodded with resignation, “That will, of course, be a massive factor, but we have deliberately not included it in these plans. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that will be a whole beast unto itself, and I strongly believe that we need to manage it completely separately. To allow that to become an integral part of these core teams could undermine our very purpose.” Neal nodded again appreciatively and recognized the seed of Barrett’s thought here. Barrett went on, confirming Neal’s assumption, “We must think of this as a military organization, one without national allegiance, like a much larger and more autonomous version of the United
Nations.”
He shrugged a little at his own comparison then went on, “That said we certainly don’t want to come under the bureaucratic auspices of that group either. In the end, I believe it is essential that we operate as independently as possible, but with the mandate of an international political body. One that must be formed specifically and solely for this purpose.”
Neal nodded emphatically now, “My thoughts exactly. And to support this we must try to source the team without regard for national origin, and I don’t mean balanced across nations, I mean without regard for national origin. From the start we must seek the best people for the job. Only then will we be able to escape the mandating of political appointees into key positions. Appointees with their own agendas.”
They all nodded, again they were in agreement. These were vital points and they would need to be immovably firm on them from the very start.
Neal went on, “Of course, it wouldn’t hurt our cause if we were to make some deliberate nominations at the beginning that make our team more diverse. To date we do have an unreasonably large number of Americans on the team and that will stick in the craw of many a European state, not to mention the Asian powers we are going to need to bring into this effort.”
“I think that, as we already hinted at,” said Barrett, “it is clear that our ability to do all this, with both the independence from and the unwavering support of all the major world powers, is going to depend very much on our ability to maintain a buffer between our teams and the politicians, because attempts at oversight are going to be … incessant.”
“No doubt.” replied Neal, nodding thoughtfully.
“A buffer,” went on Barrett, with a wry smile, “that is probably going to rely on the stubbornness and pigheadedness of whatever poor fool ends up running this circus.”
Neal looked up at the general, then smiled, chuckling quietly to himself. “Well, then I guess they got the right fool for the job,” he replied drily, as his eyes moved back to the organization charts. They all smiled. It was a joke, but it was so very true, and Neal knew he was going to have to dig in hard in the coming months to handle the pressure from above. If he was successful, then such concerns would hopefully not affect Barrett and the others too much, and he was more than a little jealous of them for that. But he would not give anyone else the job in a lifetime. It was too important, and he was going to see it through.
