Jack took the time to carefully cut the wire in the same area where Mike Summers' body was found. It took him all of forty minutes. He pulled back the thorn bush of lethal razors just enough to let a person slip through if that person was careful. He then slipped through and scanned the area on the other side of the border. He could see no guards, and with his night-vision lenses in place, he was fairly certain he would have spotted them.
Jack slipped back the way he'd come. He gestured the four people and the dog closer to him. The dog only listened because Karen dragged him closer.
"I'm saying this exactly once. I won't repeat myself. I'm taking a very big risk here, and I'm trusting you." He turned to face each of them as individuals, forcing himself to look away from Karen when she started looking uncomfortable. "If any of you ever mention Collier, Georgia to anyone beyond that fencing, I'm a dead man. Please, believe me when I say that."
The man he'd spoken to before, the one from New York, nodded emphatically. "Never a word from my lips, sir. Not to anyone."
The others nodded.
Jack held the razor wire in his gauntleted hand, grateful for the heavy padding that protected him. "Get out. Don't look back. Don't ever mention this to another soul."
They moved carefully past the barrier, and the older woman cried out softly as her arm brushed one of the blades. In a few moments, they were gone from his sight.
Jack sealed the mesh as best he could. It would take a person hours of looking to find the spot, and then they'd have to be looking in the right general area. The coarse layers of wire were too tangled to make it an easy task.
Jack allowed himself to think of Karen one last time, and smiled. At least he'd managed to save her. At least he'd done that much right. He'd only just started back to camp when he heard the chatter of rifle fire from the other side of the lethal barrier. He heard an inhuman scream, and knew Karen's dog had been hit.
Jack left the area. He slunk back to his bed and fell into a deep, troubled sleep.
He spent all of the next day wondering when they would come for him, when the other soldiers would show up and escort him to Colonel Anderson.
If anyone suspected him of any wrongdoing, they hid it remarkably well.
CHAPTER 12
1
Over the course of the next week, the men from ONYX managed to excavate most of the ship from its point of impact. They couldn't find a single scratch anywhere on the surface of the vessel, but they found quite a few substantial ruptures to the hull of the thing. Sadly, every one of the tears in the metal failed to provide anything but more questions. They quickly learned that the exterior layer was at least a foot thick, but found no point where the damage allowed even a fiber-optic camera access to the interior.
The people of Collier remained locked in their homes, and, on three separate occasions, violators of the forced house arrest learned the hard way that the Colonel wasn't playing nicely anymore. Three names were added to the list of fatalities: Andrew Wander and Wade Harper, both of Collier, and Tom Fitzroy, of Selma, Alabama. It didn't take long for the rumors to start regarding Andrew Wander's death. Whispered speculation soon maintained that he was killed in cold blood as a result of his fight with Colonel Anderson.
Had Anderson heard the rumors, he'd have laughed until he cried. Wander was the last thing on his mind; he had enough to deal with already. The reprogramming of Collier's citizens had already begun, and over a third of the population was no longer aware of the situation that held their town at bay. At present, they were unaware of anything at all, as most were being kept doped up beyond the ability to reason. The same was true of those injured in the initial landing of the bogey. Those capable of recovery, who were actually up to the rigors of the reprogramming, were carefully examined for radiation damage on a cellular level and then treated to the same battery of conditioning that everyone else in town endured.
The few who were beyond modern medical help were taken away, flown back to the Durango base and kept alive for study. In each of those rare cases, the victims had suffered extreme damage, and careful examination of their DNA showed dramatic changes were taking place. Anderson and Hawthorne both did their very best not to think about what was happening to them. Sometimes, it was best to leave a situation alone, especially if there was absolutely nothing you could do to change matters. Time would reveal what was meant to happen.
Ten people, working what seemed like impossible hours, were in the process of erasing a moment in history. Mark Anderson couldn't help but feel terrified by the notion.
While Anderson kept himself busy with the daily tasks of running the town, Major Stephen Hawthorne spent his days actively working on the mysteries of the alien craft. Hawthorne took measurements, photographs and video footage of the vessel, all the while cursing the fact that nothing they'd tried had managed to even dent the hull. The situation was even more frustrating than dealing with the interrogation he endured every night when he and Anderson got together to discuss the day's events.
Worse still, the damned thing was making noises again. Nothing as substantial as the massive rumbles that had sent people sprawling, but enough to make him worry about just what was going on inside the thing. Ultrasound, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and even good old fashioned X-rays had failed to provide any useful information: all three methods of examination proved that the thing was solid.
Most frightening of all, as far as Hawthorne was concerned, the breaches in the ship's exterior seemed to be getting smaller. Every careful measurement he'd taken and triple-checked was now inaccurate.
For the soldiers working in the ONYX Project, the hectic, exhausting pace they'd been forced to keep continued unabated. Those who could were returned to duty as soon as their injuries allowed.
None of the soldiers showed any signs of cellular mutation. Those too injured to come back to work were flown to Durango, along with the dead citizens of Collier and the soldiers who didn't live through their tour of the sleepy little town. All records of the dead were meticulously copied down, and then all electronic information on their existence was removed. The hard, physical files were being removed as well, but the process was taking a little longer.
Collier, Georgia was being erased, one piece at a time. The process was slow and painful, but the memories of that agony would fade soon enough. At least for the people who lived in Collier. Both Anderson and Hawthorne, the only people who knew all of the details of the operation and who were also present in the town, almost wished they could find the same solace as the townsfolk. Almost. Neither of them would have willingly submitted to what the conditioning experts were doing to Collier's people. They'd heard too many of the screams coming from Lucas Brightman's house, where the ten people were working their dark magic.
To the world outside of Collier, the situation in the small town had become a footnote. After the "unfortunate incident" where several of the reporters had managed to have a fatal "accident," after defying the governmental orders to stay away, very little information was released on a day-to-day basis. The situation remained unchanged, and the scandals involving this week's celebrity of the hour made for juicier reporting. The phone calls and visits made to over one hundred executives from the national news stations, the local radio and television companies and all of the newspapers and magazines worth noticing, ensured the situation remained little more than a footnote. Journalistic integrity was important to reporters, but not always as significant to the people who paid their bills. Also, it's much easier to help put a spin on a story when the lives of family members are at stake. Threaten a man and he might bristle: show the same man how easily his wife or his child can be made to suffer, and the story changes. When all was said and done, the press would get the homogenized story of ONYX's choice, and numerous important people in the industry would be paid off or receive back the incriminating evidence that could have destroyed their careers and lives.
ONYX was a fairly small organization, but one with far-reaching hands. No
one who met with them knew who they were or who they represented, but everyone who met them learned quickly that they were living on borrowed time as far as ONYX was concerned. In the modern information age, no one was safe from ONYX's hackers, who were some of the very best the world had to offer. The people who ensured the integrity of the Fourth Estate learned that integrity is a luxury. When it was all over, they'd be grateful for the scraps ONYX gave them.
2
Fifteen days after the ship had landed in Collier, the excavation was complete. The eight cranes it took to gently lower the vessel from its upright position, and down onto what the soldiers assumed was the ship's base, strained and protested under the weight. Two of the powerful winches failed before the ship was in the proper position, but the fall caused no apparent damage-not too surprising when one considered the incredible impact the vessel had already survived.
There were no obvious points of entry into the craft, and both Hawthorne and Anderson were flummoxed. The ship was larger than three football fields. It weighed too damned much to carry out by means of any known vehicle, and there was no way in hell they could move the damned thing all the way to Durango without half the nation noticing.
After careful thought and consideration-along with several heated exchanges with Mister Hardaway-the decision was made. Collier had to die. There would be no explosion; the ship remaining here ensured that, but there was always the plague to fall back on. Names would be reinserted into the appropriate computer files, bodies would officially be confiscated by the CDC, for the safety of everyone, and the survivors would be completely reprogrammed. Along with the locals, Sergeant Jack Calloway had the misfortune of meeting with the conditioning experts. Anderson waited a full week before deciding to pull Calloway from active duty. Those people he'd set free had been captured within moments of their escape. The dog found with them was being treated for gunshot wounds to the left hip and buttock.
Anderson hated himself. He loathed what he had to do, but knew of no other recourse. On the brighter side, many of the impoverished people in Collier-and there were quite a few who barely managed life at the national poverty level-would come out of the incident with well-paying jobs and exceptional benefits. The press would also be ecstatic, as they would get their juicy story after all. One mad Middle Eastern fanatic and a vial of biological stew confiscated from Libya several years earlier would explain away much of what happened. The United States of America, always looking after her own, would take care of all the relocation expenses for the unfortunate souls locked out of their beloved hometown before the hideous incident occurred. The esteemed President, completely unaware of the actual events in the town, would. likely garner a great deal of the popular vote for the successor of his choice in the near future.
The plans were made and the surgical excision of Collier, Georgia from the map of the United States began in earnest.
Two days later, it was all for nothing.
The twenty-first day of July started out like every other day for last week or more. Everyone did what they had to do. The reprogrammers handled a caseload that would surely have given any mental hospital a fiscal stroke, and the soldiers cleaned up the mess left from the entire fiasco.
Then the ship took off. Hawthorne and Anderson were standing at the edge of the lakebed, looking at the damned thing when it happened. One moment they were trying to decide the best place to put the alien craft, and the next minute the monstrous ship was lifting itself out of the cavernous pit with barely a whisper.
There was no light to give them warning. No heat assailed them as it had the people of Collier. The gigantic disc simply lifted itself into the air and hovered for a moment. Then the feedback came. White noise loud enough to cause physical agony erupted from every radio and headset within ten miles. Every engine shut down, and all of the watches stopped working. Just before the sound would have ruptured eardrums, the headsets in the survival suits of ONYX's people cut off. Hawthorne was still reeling in pain when the leviathan in front of him started moving again. Anderson screamed.
The shadow from the ship blocked out the sky as it moved overhead. One soldier, determined to keep the prize they'd struggled so hard to capture, was actually foolish enough to try hanging on to the monstrous disc. It was a lost cause, and Corporal Eric Pendleton broke both of his legs and his right arm when he fell the fifty-seven feet back to the ground. He'd spend several months recovering from the damage.
The ship hovered for several seconds, waiting for God-only-knew-what to happen, then launched itself out of the atmosphere, moving from a sun-blotting disc to a minute dot to a speck and then to nothing in less than a second. There was no hideous wind, nor even an implosion of air to let people know it had gone away.
Anderson screamed a second time, and then he sat on the ground and had what could only be called a full-scale temper tantrum. Hawthorne couldn't blame him. After a time, the necessary calls were made and the situation was explained.
And while Anderson did his work, Hawthorne contemplated the ship he'd seen, the miracle he'd actually touched. Life on other planets? Oh, my, yes. Was it friendly? Did it come seeking war? Did the life forms within the craft seek knowledge of the Earth's dominant race? Were they anything at all like the unfortunates seized so long ago in Roswell, New Mexico?
He hadn't a clue. One thought kept slipping through his mind whenever he let his guard down momentarily. One simple idea that just wouldn't let him alone. What if they come back? What the Hell will we do if they come back, and they take the way we treated them and the way we treated our own as a hostile sign?
Major Stephen Hawthorne resumed his duties as the second-in-command to Colonel Mark Anderson. He did his work with the same enthusiasm he had always employed, and he made notes on everything that occurred. He was, in short, the same man he'd always been. At least as far as the rest of the world was concerned.
Hawthorne had his own apartment at the Durango Military Installation. No one had the place bugged, and no one knew his dirty little secrets, despite his own convictions that someone, somewhere, knew every move he made and how many bowel movements he had a day.
So no one ever guessed that Hawthorne never slept another full, restful night again. His nightmares of invading fleets were a private matter. In a way, he was luckier than most. In other ways, he was far less fortunate.
EPILOGUE
Collier died. The death was painful, as predicted, and the media had a field day with the entire situation. The few people from Collier who were not home when the "plague" wiped out the town were celebrities for a time, and each and every one of them had a dozen stories to tell. For three years, Collier was looked upon as the worst case of terrorism ever to strike American soil. Naturally, someone else came along and had to outdo the statistics, but that is another story for a different time.
The lake was refilled, and the bodies were removed. Every shell casing was accounted for and the places which suffered damage during the incident were demolished. There was a story for each building destroyed. The media thrived on the excitement for over a month.
To make the story even more thrilling, Amir Hal Densalid, the most dangerous terrorist in the world, managed to escape. The U.S. Government had egg on its face, but the mad genius had done the same thing to other countries before. The United States of America joined a growing list of nations that swore the man would be brought to justice.
Anne Marie Greenberg was married to Sergeant Jack Calloway. They lived together at the Durango Military Installation and both understood that the security of their nation came before everything else. From time to time, Anne had dreams that she'd been married to another man, one far cruder than her Jack, and some nights she awoke with tears in her eyes. On those occasions, her loving husband would comfort her in his strong arms and rock her gently back to sleep. The dreams made her avoid the Whitmore Gas 'n Go, over on Baker Street: the creepy guy who owned the place looked a little too much like her imaginary ex-husband for her own comfort. This
man's hair was longer, and he had a mustache thick enough to grow potatoes in, but otherwise he could have been the spitting image of her dream enemy.
Anne taught school at the base, taking care of the young children and teaching them to love God and Country above all else. She had a good life. Her parents were good to her. The retired couple lived at the installation as well, and her father served as the base's Rabbi. It never bothered her that her parents had a strong New York accent and she had spoke with a slight Southern drawl; she'd been raised in Florida, and it was only to be expected.
But sometimes she worried about her little sister. Lucy was a little flighty from time to time, and she was an insatiable flirt, a dangerous habit when living on a military base. Still, with her folks in town and Jack to help her watch after the little minx, she knew it would all work out in the long run.
Anne loved the little community that was growing around her in Durango. It was like she'd always hoped her life would be. Almost something out of a fairy tale. She had her handsome prince, she had her family, and she had twins on the way in a few months. Life was good. She wouldn't have traded it for anything in the world.
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