“Maybe.”
As they spoke, Harbin raised an infrared thermometer in his left hand, pointed it off at something in the distance, and pulled the trigger. When the temperature appeared on the display, he frowned. He’d done this three times since she sat down.
“What is it?”
“These are accurate from a distance, right? I’ve never used one before.”
Martha held out her palm. “May I?”
He handed the device to her. It was heavier than the one she had at home. “This is military grade. I imagine pretty accurate as long as there is line of sight and you’re reading a flat surface. Why?”
He nodded forward and to the left. “Point it at that tent over there, near the ground.”
Martha followed his gaze, pointed the thermometer, and pulled the trigger. The display read fifty-two degrees.
“Now the tent directly to the right of that one, also near the ground,” Harbin instructed.
This time, the display read 102.
For reference, she then pointed the thermometer at the ground a few feet in front of them. That read sixty-three degrees.
Harbin retrieved the thermometer from her and shielded it with his hand as two guards on patrol walked silently by. He didn’t speak again until they rounded the corner and disappeared from view. When he did speak, he lowered his voice. “While you were conducting autopsies, I took some time to acquaint myself with our camp. I found a nice, quiet spot and watched the helicopters come and go, unloading their cargo. I counted two hundred and fifty-seven body bags before I was collected by Holt’s people and told to wait in the ranger station.”
“Two hundred fifty-seven?”
Harbin nodded.
That didn’t add up. “Holt said there were only about two hundred people in the village. Could he have been wrong?”
“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of man to get his facts wrong.”
“Then where did the others come from?”
Harbin didn’t have an answer for that. He looked back at the tents. “As they unloaded the bodies, a handful were brought into your medical tent for autopsy. The rest were divided among those two tents—some went into the one on the right, the others went to the left.”
Martha frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would they store some of the bodies at a higher temperature?” Even as she said this, she understood what he was alluding to. “You don’t believe…”
Harbin went on before she could continue. “I took a walk around those two tents. Both have large portable air-conditioning units attached and wired into the generator system. The first time I looked, both only had one, but over the past few hours, two more have been added to the tent on the left.”
“The hotter one?”
He nodded. “And yet, the temperature appears to be rising. Two degrees in the past thirty minutes alone.”
“That can’t be the bodies. Body heat can’t do that. A dead body doesn’t produce heat at all. It’s physically impossible.”
“How confident are you that we aren’t dealing with some form of radiation?”
“Fitch and I didn’t find anything with the dosimeters. We’ll need to see the results from the samples, but I’m fairly confident. Holt said they tested for it back at the anomaly and found nothing. I’ve seen radiation poisoning before—there are far more differences here than similarities.”
“And you only found the elevated temperatures in the bodies pulled from the crevasse, correct?”
She nodded. “The ones found in the village were crushed, but body temp was consistent with estimated time of death.”
“Where is Dr. Fitch now?”
“I’m not sure.”
Harbin sighed, raised the thermometer again, and pointed it at the tent. He tilted the display toward her—103.
Still climbing.
Martha stood and started toward the two tents.
“What are you doing?”
“I want another look at those bodies.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tennant
When Tennant woke, she sucked in a breath so hard she choked on it. She rolled to her side and clutched her knees to her chest as each gasp tried to claw back out from the inside with savagely sharp nails. When it finally stopped, she found herself on her back, slowly rocking back and forth, dust continuing to rain down on her from the boards of the ceiling above.
At first, she thought she was deaf, but then she remembered the cotton she’d shoved in her ears when that sound returned.
When was that?
Minutes ago?
Hours?
She had no idea. She didn’t know how long she’d been out.
With the tips of her fingers, she pulled the clumps of cotton from her ears and dropped them on the floor. Both were soaked with blood.
The silence became a dull ring.
The camping lantern had fallen from the storage shelf and was half buried under a bag of rice in the corner of the shelter. Dust seemed to hover in the now still air, hanging silently in the gloom of the light.
Tentatively, she touched each of her ears, then her nose. Although her fingers came away moist with blood, the actual bleeding appeared to have stopped. Her nose still ached something awful from the hit Sophie had given her earlier, but even that felt a little better.
Under the table, Zeke faced away from her. At some point, the cotton had fallen from his ears to the dirt. He burrowed his belly into the ground and thumped his tail with a nervous tempo—a heavy thwack, followed by seconds of silence, then another. His worried eyes were fixed on Sophie.
She sat on the bench, blood dripping from the wounds on her wrists and ankles where her bindings had bitten deeper during her struggles. The gag Tennant had fashioned from one of Poppa’s old shirts was on the ground, bits of it still caught in Sophie’s teeth.
When Tennant first looked at her, her sister’s gaze was lost somewhere in the dirt at her feet, her chin pressed against her chest as she glared down, but she somehow felt Tennant watching, and her head came up with one quick jerk, a twist of her neck fast and hard filled with the protests of grinding, clicking bones. Her head then slowly tilted to the left, until her ear nearly touched her shoulder. A single drop of blood fell, this stringy thing of red, and dripped down the side of her arm.
“Tennnnnnant,” Sophie said, her voice low and filled with gravel. “Untie…Tennnnnaaant.”
The words dangled from her lips.
When Sophie jerked both her wrists up with a loud crack, her bindings slapped against the bench and Tennant jumped back.
Zeke’s tail thumped, and he let out a soft whimper.
“Siiister, love you, Tennnnnnant. Untie siisster.”
The cotton Tennant had shoved into Sophie’s left ear oozed out on a thick gob of dark blood and fell onto the corner of the bench. Blood ran from her sister’s nose and eyes, too, thin lines against her horribly pale skin.
She took a step toward her sister and tentatively reached for the cotton still in her other ear.
A grin edged the corner of Sophie’s mouth. Her tongue darted out, snakelike, and lapped up a bit of the blood trailing down from her cheek. “I won’t huuurt you, siiisster, not my Tennnnnnant.”
Zeke’s tail thumped again, and he shuffled back on his haunches.
Tennant shrunk back, then asked, “Do you still have a fever?” As the words left her mouth, Tennant realized how high and wobbly her own voice sounded. She was stronger than that. Momma and Poppa had taught her to be much stronger.
Unwilling to give in to fear, Tennant took a step closer to Sophie and held her hand out. She didn’t have to touch her sister’s forehead to feel the heat.
Tennant had killed a deer the week prior with a shot from her bow, the arrow piercing both lungs, just as Poppa had taught her. She had gone to the animal in its final moments and cradled its soft head. She had found herself looking into the deer’s eyes as she stroked its neck, her other hand on its heart. She felt the wild be
ats slow and fade away to nothingness. Momma had once said if you paid close attention, you’d see the spirit rise to the heavens in the moment the eyes shift from the living to the dead, and Tennant believed she had.
As she looked into her sister’s eyes, they seemed to be caught in the instant right before that moment, as if her spirit wished to escape but found itself tethered to her body much like Sophie was tethered to the bench.
“You have preettty hair, Tennnant,” Sophie said softly in that thick voice. “Braid my hair like yoourrs?”
Spittle rolled off the side of Sophie’s lip and hung from her chin, thick with mucus and tainted with flecks of blood.
Her sister smelled.
She smelled not only of the sweat and dirt of the day but something else, a scent Tennant recognized. A smell that had no place on the living.
Tennant found herself unable to move, her hands and feet frozen in place.
“Untie me, and I’ll brush your preettty hair,” Sophie went on. “One hundred strokes on the left, one hunnndred more on the right, will leave yoouur hair sooo soft and liiight.”
Momma used to say this when she was younger, as she drew a brush through her hair, counting aloud with each stroke. Hearing the words from her now felt wrong, tainted.
Sophie grinned at her, that horrid grin as she watched her with those dead eyes.
Tennant managed to shake her head.
“Untie me, you fucking bitch whore!”
Her sister screamed this out with the ferocity of a trapped beast loud enough to rattle the few cans still perched on the shelves. She jutted forward, taking the heavy bench with her nearly a foot before the weight of it won out.
Zeke let out a yelp, and Tennant shuffled back several steps before turning, climbing the steps, and pushing out through the door into the cold night air.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tennant
The sky was black, punctured with the light of a million stars, the constellations Poppa had taught her all looking down from the heavens upon her mountain, her home. Tennant drew in several deep breaths and slowly let each out, washing away the grime and filth that had filled her lungs as the shelter collapsed around her. She wanted to force away the stench of death she’d smelled seeping from her sister’s pores, that now clung to her clothes, her skin, her hair.
Down in the shelter, Sophie let out another scream, and Zeke came bounding up the steps. When he spotted Tennant, he ran to her and nuzzled her legs.
She reached down and scratched behind his ear. “She’s sick, boy.”
Momma and Poppa will find the recording, and they’ll be here soon. Help Sophie get better.
Oh, how she wanted to believe that.
The idea of slipping a pill between her sister’s lips, her teeth, sent a shiver down her spine. She’d sooner reach into the mouth of a black bear and stroke its tongue.
The air felt oddly still. No wind, not even a breeze.
Glancing around, Tennant realized there were no animals, either.
Rabbits, skunks, opossums, raccoons—none of the creatures normally out at night were active. She hadn’t been bitten by a single mosquito, and while they weren’t so common this high up the mountain, it was rare to go this long without a single bite.
Bending down, she scooped up a rock and tossed it into the brush about ten feet away.
Nothing.
She threw several more, and not even a squirrel or chipmunk scurried out. In the trees, she didn’t see a single bird or owl. More times than not when she visited this particular shelter, she had found bats—Poppa had said they like the cool dampness found underground. There had been no bats when she and Sophie first arrived.
About five years ago, a wildfire scorched the south side of the mountain, threatened to spread near their village, and sensing the danger, the animals had left. She and Sophie had perched out on Logan’s Bluff and watched scores of deer, bear, and other creatures run not only from the flames below but the smoke and the potential path. The fire had been out for nearly two weeks before they returned.
Much like a fire, that sound, whatever that was, had frightened everything off. Nothing else could explain it.
Sophie let out this gut-wrenching scream, and Tennant jumped. She went on for nearly a minute before her voice finally trailed off and she went back to muttering. Her shrill cries echoed down the side of the mountain like the waters of a geyser erupting from the shelter and rolling down through the woods.
Aside from Tennant and Zeke, not a single creature stirred.
Not a single wild creature.
At first, Tennant didn’t see the light down below, at least a half mile away; the tree cover was too thick. But as Sophie’s screams died away, the light shifted, pointed up toward them, and Tennant knew it was a flashlight. The single light became four or five, all sweeping back and forth through the trees.
Momma or Poppa?
But even as she thought this, the lights seemed too bright to be one of the old flashlights they had back at the village.
She heard voices then, anxious voices.
Unknown voices.
Pulling Zeke behind her, Tennant scrambled back to the shelter and pulled the door closed.
From the pale light in the corner, Sophie let out a soft hiss. “Anna Shim,” she whispered anxiously. “Annnna shiiimmm.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Martha
Martha and Harbin found two guards positioned outside the medical tent. Both stepped into their path, blocking the entrance. Before either had a chance to speak, Martha said, “I’m looking for Dr. Fitch.”
The first one shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. His right cheek was dotted with acne, and while the Army had tried to bulk him up, his uniform hung loose on his rail-like frame. “I don’t know a Dr. Fitch, ma’am.”
Like the other soldiers, neither guard wore a name tag.
“Dr. Fitch and I are in the middle of conducting autopsies, and I need to take another look at the bodies.”
The second guard raised a small tablet and took a photo of her, then tapped the screen. After a moment, he showed the screen to the first soldier, then looked back at her. “Dr. Chan, correct?”
Martha nodded.
“I’m afraid your authorization window for Medical has expired.” He paused for a second and frowned. “Frankly, you should be resting. You’re scheduled to return to the anomaly in three and a quarter hours.”
“I am?”
The soldier stared at her, blank-faced.
“Nobody told me.”
“Do you need help locating your bunk?”
Martha took a step closer. “Like I said, I conducted several autopsies earlier with Dr. Fitch. I need to confirm something.” She gestured toward the tent. “In there.”
The soldier raised the tablet again, this time pointing the camera at Harbin. After scrolling down the screen, he said, “Dr. Harbin isn’t green-lit for Medical at all. I suggest you speak to your handler or commanding officer.”
“Where can I find Keenen Holt?” Martha asked, her heart thumping at the sight of the younger soldier tightening his grip on his weapon.
“I don’t know who that is, ma’am.”
Nodding at the tablet, Harbin spoke. “Does that contain a record of everyone at Zigzag?”
Again, the soldier’s face went blank. He didn’t answer.
Harbin offered a disarming smile and nodded at the tablet. “We hate to be a burden, but Holt is our…our handler. We need you to direct us to his current whereabouts.”
Rather than run a search on the tablet, the soldier lowered the device back to his side. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Martha took another step closer, rolled back her shoulders, and did her best to make all five-foot-one of her tiny frame look intimidating. “If you prefer, I can contact your commanding officer. The powers that be went to a lot of trouble to get both Dr. Harbin and me here, and you’re preventing us from follow
ing through on our orders.”
The soldier took a step closer, his chest nearly touching hers. “Intimidation tactics only work in the movies, ma’am. I won’t let you into this tent without authorization, period. If you continue to harass me, I will have you brought to the brig until this can be sorted out. I strongly suggest you return to your quarters.”
“Just tell us where Holt is,” Martha pushed. “Please. We’ll get out of your hair.”
He gave Martha a frustrated glance, sighed, and went back to the tablet. After several clicks, he said, “Mr. Holt returned to the anomaly at 16:32 and hasn’t returned.”
The younger soldier shuffled slightly at the statement but said nothing.
Martha opened her mouth to ask another question when automatic weapons fire cracked somewhere near the east side of the camp.
Chapter Thirty
Martha
“That came from near the helicopters,” Harbin said, turning to the east.
From the radios attached to both soldiers’ belts, a voice said, “Unauthorized movement, Sector Five. Two, maybe three bogies.”
Harbin grabbed Martha’s arm. “Come on.”
Together, they ran between the tents through the camp. Dr. Fravel was standing outside his tent, shirtless in a pair of sweatpants, his eyes swollen with sleep. He stared at them as they ran by.
The soldiers reached the helicopter pads, weapons at the ready. Three more were on a platform looking out over the wall toward the forest beyond the grass surrounding Zigzag.
One of the soldiers on the platform leaned out over the razor wire, the barrel of his weapon trained on something off in the woods, a faint red laser barely visible on the fog settling over the mountain. Like the soldiers guarding the medical tent, he was just a kid. Looking around, Martha realized how young they all looked. She stepped up to a female soldier with cropped red hair. “Who’s in charge here?”
The woman gave her an irritated glance, then shouted up at the other soldiers. “Morrison? What’s going on?”
“I saw at least three out there just past the tree line!”
The Noise Page 9
