Reset

by Brian Andrews

  “A good approach, a good perspective. I’m going to go with that.” Legend closed his eyes and took a moment to rub his temples. When he opened his eyes, he said, “I trust the two of you to hold down the fort here and continue monitoring. I’m going to see if I can find an empty office upstairs where I can set up shop. I have reports to write, and I have a feeling I’m going to be working from here for the foreseeable future. Call me immediately if conditions change with the orb, the rats, or the rover.”

  “Will do,” Malcolm said, and with a smile on his face, he happily watched the Major depart, leaving him alone with the woman of his dreams to investigate the scientific enigma of a lifetime.

  CHAPTER 20

  1311 Local Time

  Interstate 81 South

  Upstate New York

  Josie was ten miles from Cortland when she got the call.

  When she saw the caller ID, she screamed with involuntary joy and pulled off the road because she didn’t trust herself to stay in her lane.

  “Michael!” she said with a gasp as she answered the phone.

  “Yeah, baby, it’s me,” said the familiar, beautiful voice on the line.

  “Oh my God, are you okay? They told me you were checked into Walter Reed undergoing testing for probable head trauma. I’ve been calling, texting, and emailing you like crazy since I heard you were being flown back yesterday, but when I didn’t hear anything I started getting really scared,” she said in a rambling flurry without taking a breath.

  “Breathe, Joz.” He laughed. “Take a breath for me, okay?”

  Josie put her hand to her chest and exhaled. Her heart was pounding like mad, and it didn’t feel like it had any intention of slowing down. “Okay, I’m breathing, I’m breathing.”

  “All right, so first off, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to call you until now. They took my phone in Bagram and I just got it back. Second, I’m okay. The docs here are releasing me on convalescent leave, pending approval by my unit CO.”

  She opened her mouth, and everything came pouring out in a torrent. She’d had so much pent up inside that her thoughts tumbled over one another. “Oh thank God. I’ve missed you so much. It will be so good to see you. Remember that doomsday prepper Willie Barnes we made the audition tape for? Well, it worked, and I interviewed him yesterday. He’s so weird; he lives in an old, abandoned missile silo. I can’t wait to tell you about it. And there’s something else I’ve been putting off telling you, but I want to do it in person. Also, I want to hear everything that happened to you. What did the doctors say? Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Okay, wow, you crammed a million things in there. I’m not sure how to even respond to that,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Start with you. Can you tell me what happened? Did you actually have a head trauma?”

  “Something did happen, but I can’t talk about it right now. What I can tell you is that I passed out and had a seizure, well, two seizures, but I’m okay. The docs here at Walter Reed did a CT scan of my brain, and everything checked out.”

  “A seizure?” she said, confused, a wife’s worry reignited in her. “You’ve never had a seizure before, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t. Which is why they’re recommending fourteen days’ leave so they can monitor me and make sure there’s not a problem before sending me back.”

  “Wait, what? They’re going to send you back?”

  “Well, yeah, Joz. The unit is on deployment. As long as I’m in fighting form, I gotta go back. But we’re going to have two weeks together. That’s something to be happy about . . . isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, trying to flip her outlook from glass half-empty to glass half-full. “Do you want me to come to you? I’m actually in the car right now, heading your way.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. You think I’d leave you in some hospital all alone? You’re my everything.”

  “How close are you?”

  “I just started driving this morning. I’m outside of Corning.”

  He laughed. “In that case, go ahead and turn around. I’m booked on the 1620 nonstop American Eagle flight to Syracuse. I get in at 1755.”

  “In that case, I’ll pick you up at the airport,” she said. “Maybe we can grab dinner out to celebrate you coming home?”

  “Sounds like a plan, but, Joz?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you bring a change of clothes along for me? All I have is my uniform.”

  “Will do, sweetheart. Fly safe. I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Me too, baby,” he said.

  “I love you, Michael.”

  “Love you too.”

  She let him end the call. An upswell of emotion washed over her—causing her to laugh and cry at the same time. She was more emotional than she could ever remember. It’s the hormones; that’s all, she reassured herself. This unexpected homecoming was throwing her brain for a loop. She’d prepared herself for Michael to be gone for six months. She’d boxed the very prospect of seeing him into the back far corner of her mind, but now that the gift had been opened prematurely, there was no chance of wrapping it back up. Sorta like letting a puppy out of a kennel for playtime; it was heart-wrenching to put the puppy back in the cage when playtime was over. Still smiling and still crying, she put the transmission in drive and was about to accelerate and merge back onto the highway when her mobile chimed with an unfamiliar ringtone. Putting her foot back on the brake, she looked at her phone: DJ Mood was requesting a Skype. She opened the app and accepted the incoming video-chat request.

  “Hey, DJ,” she said, looking at his face in profile.

  After a beat, he spun to face her. “This dude William Barnes you had me look up, he’s 5150.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” she said.

  “It means he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs—ya know, crazy.”

  “Sure, he’s a little odd, but I think to be a prepper you’ve gotta have at least one loose screw up top.”

  DJ shook his head. “No, that’s not what I’m talking about, Joz-Joz you curl my toes. The brother was committed to Rockland State Hospital in the 1960s.”

  “What is Rockland State Hospital?”

  “It was an insane asylum. Rockland was the inspiration for the hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I kid you the fuck not. This guy is an A-1 nutjob.”

  Her stomach went queasy upon hearing this. “So are you saying he was never a Missileer in the Air Force? He’s just some delusional, paranoid old man, tinfoil hats and all?”

  “No, that part checked out. He was an officer in the Air Force, but they committed him to Rockland in October 1963. They took away his commission in January of 1964, but he didn’t get out of Rockland until October 1966.”

  “Were you able to find out why he was committed?”

  “His official diagnosis was schizophrenia. His service records are sealed. His electronic health record doesn’t go back that far.”

  She’d experienced more than one uncomfortable moment with Willie during the silo tour, but the incident on level seven, near the bottom, had weirded her out the most. The burning paranoid look in his eyes when he asked her if the “other Josie” talked to her. Now that she had some context, that was starting to make more sense. Maybe Willie Barnes was still battling his demons . . .

  “Where did you find this stuff?” she asked.

  “I have my ways and means,” he said.

  “What else?”

  “He was in and out of hospitals in the 1970s and ’80s. In the ’90s, he went off the grid for a while. Then he resurfaced and started a legit software company, had a steady mailing address, started paying taxes, voted in the 2000 and 2004 elections, seemingly reintegrated into society. He sold the company in 2005 for several million. After that, he started a bioscience company called Biogentrix, but it’s not doing much of anything—reports a small loss every year.”

  “Interesting,” she said, scrambling in the glove compa
rtment for a piece of paper and a pen. She wrote down the name of the company. Biogentrix. Now this was odd: the Willie Barnes she’d met didn’t fit the mold of a bioscience entrepreneur. “Why the heck would a doomsday prepper like Willie Barnes start a bioscience company?”

  “Maybe he’s trying to develop a super antibiotic to protect him when antibiotic-resistant bacteria take over the world.”

  “I’m serious, DJ.”

  “Okay, fine,” he said with a sigh. “He’s probably using it as some sort of tax shelter. People do shit like that all the time.”

  “Hmmm, I don’t know,” she said. “Anything else noteworthy?”

  “Yeah, about the same time, he started buying property in upstate New York, and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “He bought a missile silo! The dude owns a freaking missile silo.”

  “I know. I thought I told you that.”

  “No, you most certainly did not. You told me he was a rocket man; you didn’t say he actually had a rocket-launching silo in his possession.”

  “It’s pretty damn cool; he gave me a tour.”

  “Wait a minute—you willingly went underground, alone, with Willie ‘the rocket man from Rockland’ Barnes?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t know he was crazy at the time. I suppose I should have had you run a background check first.”

  “And let that be a lesson to you, young lady,” he said, dropping his voice an octave and wagging a finger at her.

  “Is that it, or do you have anything else for me?”

  “Apparently he’s part of some Armageddon-government-conspiracy watchdog group.”

  “That sounds like Willie.”

  “I tried to hack their site in the dark web, but their security is top-flight tight. If I had time, I could get in, but this is a freebie, yo, and I’ve already spent too much time on this as it is. Unless of course you . . .”

  “No,” she snapped.

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Goodbye, DJ.”

  “Seriously though, Josie, be careful with this Barnes guy.”

  “I will. Thanks for the help.”

  “Anytime,” he said and ended the chat.

  She leaned her head back against the headrest.

  Note to self—when talking to Michael about the trip to the missile silo, probably best to omit the part about Willie’s schizophrenia . . . and his unhackable government conspiracy dark website . . . and how I let him blindfold me . . . and how I let him take me underground alone . . .

  Yeah, probably best to focus on the aquaponics and the tasty buffalo jerky.

  CHAPTER 21

  2325 Local Time

  BRIG Control Room

  Westfield Dynamics

  Culpeper, Virginia

  This moment epitomized why Malcolm adored her.

  It was after eleven o’clock at night, and Cyril was still here—not incessantly checking the clock, not surfing the web on her iPhone, not complaining about the fact that nothing noteworthy had happened with the orb in over twelve hours. To the contrary, she was bright-eyed, jocular, and fully engaged as he told her all about his trip to Brazil. If regaling her with tales of zombie-ant fungus didn’t drive her away, then it was just one more incontrovertible piece of evidence that they were meant for each other.

  “Malcolm, something is happening,” she said, her gaze suddenly flitting from his eyes to the monitor over his shoulder.

  He swiveled around in his chair and looked at the live video feeds streaming from inside the BRIG.

  “There, right there,” she said, pointing to the scurrying movement along the floor between rover one and the steel box. “Do you see them?”

  “Yessss,” he said, pushing his glasses higher onto his nose. “What are they doing?”

  Cyril grabbed the joystick controlling the bird’s-eye-view camera and zoomed out until the concrete floor around the box came into the frame along with six rats running in a tight circle. “They’re running anticlockwise,” she said, pointing at the screen. “Do you see how uniform the spacing is?”

  “Almost a perfect sixty degrees apart,” he answered. “And fast, so very fast.”

  Abruptly the rats stopped running a racetrack around the box and began to circle in place, each one chasing its tail, carving the tightest possible circle. Then they stopped.

  “Six revolutions,” Cyril said. “I didn’t count the orbitals, but I would guess they made six passes around as well . . . What are they doing now?”

  Malcolm watched as the rats stood on their hind legs, forelimbs raised skyward, snouts tilted up. His stomach tightened. He’d seen this pose before . . .

  “Shit,” he barked and slid sideways on his roller chair to look at another feed, the one from the camera aimed at the magnetometer. “I was right,” he said, jumping to his feet. “Look at these fluctuating magnetic-field readings. The orb is using transcranial magnetic stimulation to control the rats just as I postulated.”

  “This is significant. We’ve got to call Major Tyree,” Cyril said, pulling her mobile phone from her left pantsuit pocket.

  “Oh no,” Malcolm said, the blood draining from his face. “Look, look, look!” He pointed at one of the rovers speeding toward the personnel-access door.

  “Are you doing that?” she asked.

  “No!” he snapped. “It’s driving itself.”

  “Bloody hell. We’ve got to warn the guard outside the door. What’s his name?”

  “Unger,” Malcolm said.

  “You call Unger on the radio; I’ll call Major Tyree.”

  Cyril dialed and raised her mobile phone to her ear. “Damn it, he’s not picking up . . . It’s going to voice mail.”

  When prompted, she left her message: “Legend, it’s Cyril calling. We’ve got a problem. The orb is waking up. Wherever you are, you’d better drop what you’re doing and get down to the BRIG control room.”

  While Cyril was leaving her message for Tyree, Malcolm fumbled with the radio. He hoped it was on the right channel. “Unger, this is the control room. Do you copy?”

  Static.

  “Unger, this is the control room. Do you copy?” he called again, this time emphasizing each word.

  A loud crack reverberated in the corridor outside.

  “What the hell was that?” Cyril asked, all the color draining from her face.

  “Sounded like a gunshot.”

  The radio crackled, and then a voice came back: “Control room, this is Unger. Go ahead.”

  “Is everything okay out there?”

  “Yeah, everything is five by five,” the calm and collected voice said.

  “Ask him if that was a gunshot we just heard,” Cyril demanded.

  “Okay,” he said, and he was about to key the radio when activity on the monitors to Cyril’s right caught his eye. “I think we might have a problem,” he said, pointing at the video feed of the rover now stopped in front of the personnel-access door, articulated arm repositioning in front of the keypad, a rat perched on the outstretched claw pushing buttons.

  “Yes, Dr. Madden, I think we just might,” a voice said, placid and baritone, not from the radio but from inside the control room.

  “Malcolm?” Cyril said, her voice sounding strange.

  Malcolm turned his head toward the door, and his heart skipped a beat. There in the doorway—hulking and kitted up for battle—stood the red-bearded Harris. His pistol was drawn, and he had the muzzle pointed at Cyril’s head. A dozen possible replies populated in Malcolm’s brain, but the one that came out took him by surprise: “You’re not Unger.”

  “No, I’m not,” Harris said. “But you don’t need to worry about him. He’s not going to be a problem for us.”

  “Whatever you do, just don’t hurt her,” Malcolm pleaded, his eyes darting back and forth between Cyril and the man with the gun. “In fact, take me instead.”

  Harris bobbed his head from side to side in mock indecision and then said, “Tell you what, Dr. Madden, I ha
ve a better idea. How about I take both of you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  2331 Local Time

  Westfield Dynamics

  Culpeper, Virginia

  He didn’t remember falling asleep. That’s how tired Legend was. One minute he’d been reading about transcranial-magnetic-stimulation studies being conducted at Duke University; the next minute his head was lolling. Angry, overstretched neck muscles jerked him awake. He opened his eyes for a beat in drowsy confusion, but heavy lids quickly usurped control and sent his chin bobbing off his chest again.

  Somewhere far away he heard a mobile phone ringing.

  In the semiconscious regions of his brain, a voice told him the phone was his. “I don’t care,” he mumbled, but he was a soldier and an officer, and that meant he had to care.

  He forced his eyelids open and took a deep breath as he tried to get his bearings. The desk he was sitting at was not his own. He was not at the Pentagon . . . That’s because he’d stayed at Westfield D, working late just in case something happened.

  Just in case the orb woke up.

  Groggily he reached for his mobile phone. The call had been from Cyril, and there was a voice mail waiting for him. He pressed the play icon and turned on the speaker: “Legend, it’s Cyril calling. We’ve got a problem. The orb is waking up . . .”

  He didn’t wait for it to finish before he was up and sprinting. He flew down the steps to the basement level, the rapid-fire cadence of his feet echoing in the concrete stairwell. When he reached the bottom, he slammed into the rocker bar on the steel door and sent it flying open. He dashed down the corridor toward the BRIG control room. When he got to door, he found it curiously ajar. He pushed it the rest of the way open and found the control room deserted.