A few minutes later, the colonel was on the line. Harrison tried to ignore the sense of overwhelming doom creeping over him, but it wasn't working. They needed to do something soon, or the situation was going to go from screwed to fucked real quick.
"This had better be important, major, or you're going to find yourself someplace very unpleasant." The colonel sounded angry but also a little curious.
"I'm sure you're very busy, colonel. I'm on an open channel, but what's going on? Has there been an insurgency?"
"What the hell are you taking about?"
"I'm in Brownsville, Indiana, sir. We've got a problem here, colonel. A big problem." Harrison briefly summed up the situation.
"Stoner, that is craziest load of shit I have ever been fed."
Despite the circumstances, Harrison smiled briefly at the use of his old nickname. "Sir, I'm as serious as I can be. Richards, Gottlieb, and Collins are dead, sir. You know I wouldn't joke about that. Everyone in this town is dead."
"Damn. You're sure? Of course you are," the colonel said, answering his own question. "Those were good men. I'll be honest, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. There haven't been any alerts. Sounds like a bunch of fascist militia or something. Sit tight and let me make a few calls. You're just seventy kilometers south of Camp Atterbury. I'll light a fire under their asses and get the Marines down there ASAP. Give me two hours, and whoever those bastards are, they'll be sorry. I promise you."
"Tell 'em to wear armbands, sir, and NBC gear. These bastards are dressed in old army gear, and this plague is virulent."
"Just two hours."
"I just hope I've got that much time, colonel."
Chapter Four
Two hours later and still no reinforcements, Harrison thought with irritation.
Harrison paced as he waited. He wasn't used to sitting still and not doing anything. The chatter on the radio was that the enemy troops were pulling out. Harrison's reinforcements were due any minute, but if even one of the enemy made it outside the town limits, they could start a pandemic – there were over two million people in the nearby Indianapolis metropolitan area – and that was something that Harrison couldn't allow to happen.
It was his duty to stop them.
There was no sign of the enemy near the house he currently occupied. He set off on foot, trying to keep to cover in case they had a sniper on the watch. He knew from the radio transmissions he'd intercepted that the enemy had set up their headquarters near the old refinery at the western edge of town. Getting there unseen wasn't easy. The enemy seemed to be converging on the same location. Patrols came in every few minutes.
The enemy soldiers were entering a tent and not coming out.
Some of the men were rolling fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel into a large modular general-purpose tent. Thick hoses ran from the tent to the three large oil tanks. They were pumping the oil out of the tanks to… somewhere.
"They must be using tunnels or something," Harrison muttered.
The men rolling the fuel drums didn't come back out, either. Harrison saw no Humvees nearby. He saw plenty of tracks, but they all seemed to lead into the west side of the tent, which made no sense at all.
The last of the fuel drums was rolled inside.
The only thing he could think of was that they were pumping the oil underground and were going to set it off, blow up the whole town, destroy the evidence of what they had done. He couldn't let that happen, either. He couldn't let the bastards who did this escape. They had to pay for what they'd done.
After checking again for snipers he wouldn't have been able to see anyway, Harrison ran across the lawn from his vantage point. He could hear people talking inside, giving orders. The fuel drums made a distinctive noise as they rolled, but listen as closely as he could, Harrison didn't hear them rolling into an underground chamber, only a faint howling noise that made his hair stand on end. A cold wind was blowing past him into the tent, as if it hid a connection to the sewers under the town. The noise and wind were probably from air rushing through the sewer tunnels. Probably.
He checked his rifle and stepped around the corner to the opening. A quick glance showed him two guards with rifles and three technicians with notepad computers, just inside the tent. The farthest guard shouted when he saw Harrison, but that only made him the first to die.
Harrison fired the rifle in short, controlled bursts; he didn't have ammunition to spare. He ran into the tent, hoping surprise would give him the advantage he needed. Neither of the guards got off a shot. The technicians died while running away.
Harrison dropped to the ground, rolling, as gunfire ripped through the tent wall in front of him. The internal partitions made it impossible to tell how many people were inside. He returned fire when the shots ceased. A hoarse scream rewarded his efforts. He emptied the rest of the rounds in the magazine at knee level across the whole tent. He flinched when he heard the distinctive sound of bullets hitting metal drums.
To hell with it! he thought.
He drew his pistol and ran deeper into the tent. Any man he found still alive, wounded or otherwise, got a .45 caliber bullet through the head.
The wind grew colder and more powerful as he approached the center of the tent. The howling sounded like a train full of demons having a bad day. An odd bluish light flickered through the tent flaps just ahead of him. The sounds and the flickering light made his head hurt worse.
He inched forward and gave the room a quick survey. He spotted crates of ammunition and a litter of empty beer cans, cereal boxes, and candy bar wrappers, but what really caught his attention was the gaping black hole in the air, through which three men frantically rolled leaking fuel drums. The hole was five meters wide and two high, almost reaching the top of the tent. Harrison knew it was a hole because the faint howling came out of it. The air was condensing to fog as it poured out. The smell of gasoline was overwhelming.
"Freeze!" Harrison shouted.
The men froze.
Ordinarily, Harrison would have just shot them, but the strange hole made him think maybe he should keep a few of them alive to help figure out what the hell it was and how to close it. He needed to know who these people were and why they had attacked the town.
One of the men started to turn around.
"I said freeze! On your knees! Hands on your head!"
The man turned to face him.
The man looked like him. Was him. Harrison. Same scars on the face. He knew the face he shaved in the mirror, and that was it.
Harrison lowered his gun slowly. His head started pounding even worse. Could all of this be a fever dream? Was he still lying on that bed? Was he having a psychotic break?
"What the hell?"
The man quick-drew a pistol and shot Harrison twice in the chest.
Blackness overwhelmed him for a moment, then searing pain as he hit the floor. Harrison almost passed out, but not quite. He coughed and gagged on the blood. His right lung had been hit. He had bigger problems, though.
His doppelganger stood over him, frowning.
Harrison had dropped his pistol when he was shot. It was too far from his questing fingers, and there was no way he could crawl to get it. He couldn't have even if the other him hadn't had a gun pointed at Harrison's head. He'd never been shot in the chest without a ballistic vest on. He'd never suspected it could be so painful, so debilitating. He sent a silent apology to the men he'd told in the past to suck it up and keep quiet. It hurt!
"Who the hell are you?" he croaked. The smell of gasoline was strong. He tried to reach into his jacket pocket.
His other self's frown turned to a look of pure hatred. "You can't exist!" the man screamed. It was Harrison's voice. "You can't!" The man kicked him, hard, over and over. "What are you?"
Tucked against the blows, trying not to pass out from pain, Harrison felt his hand close over what he'd been questing for in his pocket.
The doppelganger stopped kicking him. Madness was painted over that horribl
y familiar face in splotchy red and spittle.
"I'm John Michael Harrison," he gasped. "Who the fuck are you?"
"I'm John Michael Harrison, you lying sack of shit!" The man raised a foot to stomp the life from him.
"Fuck you," Harrison replied as he lit his lighter and tossed it into the spilled gasoline.
The gasoline concentration in the air was high. It ignited instantly, backflashing to the fuel cans and the men who had been moving them, now covered in burning gasoline. Harrison rolled up as tightly as he could as the flames washed over him. The screams were terrible. A second explosion ripped through the tent. The concussion from the blast knocked Harrison unconscious, and the darkness took away the pain.
Chapter Five
Harrison woke bound to a stretcher, an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. He struggled against the restraints until a Marine in NBC gear leaned over him. This Marine had the correct unit patches on his gear. Harrison tried to pantomime the danger.
"Settle down, sir. We're on a chopper, headed for Bethesda. Don't try to speak."
"Quarantine!" he gasped.
"We've got it covered, sir."
Darkness welled back up, and he welcomed it.
He had vague impressions of being rushed through an emergency room filled with shouting people, and then into surgery. A masked anesthesiologist injected him with something, and then he was gone again.
Light from the rising sun woke him. His chest hurt, but not as much as he had thought it would. He suspected they were giving him pain medication through his IV. He rubbed his eyes and tried to sit up, but that hurt too much. Clear plastic sheeting surrounded his bed, and armed MPs stood outside the door to his room.
He lay there and thought about what had happened. Most of it wasn't clear to him; it all felt very distant, which was probably for the best. He remembered waking up, feeling disoriented, with his friends dead around him. He remembered the men in the Humvee and the tent with the burning fuel. And then there was the other him.
Harrison reached up and gingerly touched his face. It was a little bit tender, but he didn't appear to have burned his face off or anything. That was something of a relief. He'd rolled into a ball and covered his face when he tossed the lighter, but he'd been sure he was going to roast. He suspected that his leather jacket had protected him from the worst of the thermal flash.
He could clearly remember the screams of the men who'd been less fortunate, and the smell. That smell was going to stick with him for a long time. They'd smelled like burning hotdogs. He didn't think he'd be able to eat pork for a while.
Not that he had any remorse for what he'd done. Those bastards had killed his friends. They had killed an entire town. Harrison had done what he had to do, nothing more or less. Still, there were questions that required answers.
Who was the man who looked like him?
What the hell was the hole in the air?
A nurse wearing a surgical mask came in after a while. "Oh, you're awake!" He left again.
A minute later, a doctor came in. She was also wearing a mask.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Like I was shot in the chest a few times and blown up."
She chuckled. "I'm Dr. Kapoor. You're at Bethesda, major. You had us worried when you didn't wake up after the surgery."
"How long has it been?"
"You were brought in two weeks ago. You've had two surgeries, actually."
He didn't remember that. At least he couldn't be too contagious, since the doctor wasn't wearing a biocontainment suit, just a mask.
"Would you like to sit up?"
"Please."
She used the control on the bed to raise him. It hurt, but he'd expected it would. He still felt better sitting up. He closed his eyes until the spinning stopped, and then he tentatively stretched a little. Moving was just as painful as he'd figured it would be. Bizarrely, he felt hungry. The doctor just nodded when he told her.
"That's a good sign. Let me take a look at you."
She put on gloves and sat on the edge of the bed. He could see her dog tags as she bent over him; she was military, which he'd expected. Harrison winced as the doctor worked the gauze pads away from his wounds, but he could see that the stitches had already been removed and the wounds were healing cleanly. She didn't replace the pads.
She smelled slightly of cardamom, which made his stomach grumble.
"Well, the good news is that you aren't contagious," she said as she stood up.
"I figured that."
"The bad news is that the CDC wants to keep you in isolation for another two weeks, just to make sure."
"Does isolation preclude real food?"
"I guess that depends on your definition of real food. I'll have the nurse bring you a tray in a few minutes."
"Sounds good," he replied. He'd eat just about anything, at that point. "Just no pork, okay?"
Even the memory of the smell of the enemy dead made him ill. He had to fight down an urge to vomit. He didn't think his body could take it just then. Wouldn't it be ironic to choke to death on my own vomit in a hospital bed, after all I've been through? Somehow, he couldn't manage to laugh at that.
"I'll let the nurse know."
The weeks passed slowly. The hours of boredom were interspaced with the inevitable hours of questioning by various men in suits. He'd expected that. He had, for all intents, blown up part of a town and a fuel storage facility. At least they weren't accusing him of being a terrorist, which would have been too much for him to bear. He couldn't determine how much of his story they believed; they just nodded and wrote everything down. He must have answered the same questions a dozen times, but he knew the men in suits were just doing their jobs.
Slowly, he pieced together what had happened. An extraction team had found Harrison on one of the last sweeps through the town. The fire in the tent spread to the refinery, and the whole damn thing had gone up in flames. The blast leveled half the town. The team was surprised Harrison was still alive. He was, too, to be honest. There had been no sign of his alter ego. nor other enemy soldiers – not alive, anyway, although they'd recovered the bodies for study.[PBS1][PBS2][PBS3][PBS4]
The hole in the air had vanished.
Harrison had been infected with an engineered strain of influenza, as he'd suspected. He was the only survivor from Brownsville. Everyone else had either succumbed to the virus or been killed by the death squads. No one could explain where the men had come from or what the hole in air had been. Harrison wasn't even completely convinced that the military believed him about the hole.
He wasn't completely sure if he believed it himself.
Chapter Six
His only real visitor while he was in the hospital was Major Michael Delling, the only other surviving member of his old team. The only survivor after Brownsville, anyway. Harrison felt a burning rage and a desire to jump up and hunt the bastards who had killed his friends, but he knew couldn't.
"How you holding up, Stoner?" Delling asked as he entered the room. He wasn't wearing a mask, but then, he never got sick anyway.
Harrison smiled and shook his head. His old team had called him Stoner because he liked to listen to psychedelic rock, and because he was born in the Summer of Love, '69. Or maybe it was because he was so laid-back. Yeah, right.
"Ready to get the hell out of here," he answered.
Delling nodded and sat on the edge of the bed. Michael Delling was a big man, six-foot-six and two forty. His dark red hair always tended to stick out from his head, no matter how short it was cut. He was a few years younger than Harrison and looked as in-shape as ever. Harrison was a bit envious. He felt like he'd gone to flab, lying in the hospital bed. It was going to take him months to get his physique back.
"You look like life is treating you well," he added. "Still a federal marshal?"
"Deputy. Yeah. Thinking about retiring."
Harrison couldn't imagine that, and said so.
Delling shrugged. "Been deal
ing with a lot shit recently. Life's been weirder than I imagined it could be."
"You, too, huh? Col. Jackson tell you about what happened?"
Delling smiled. "You know that's classified."
"Ha! He did tell you, then."
"Yeah, he told me. You got yourself into some seriously weird shit there, brother. Maybe my life isn't so weird, after all."
"Tell me about it," Harrison said bitterly. "What have you been up to? What's got you so freaked?"
"Just the usual," Delling said. "Hunting fugitives, fighting off hordes of rabid cultists, vampires, monsters, that sort of thing."
"So nothing interesting."
"Asshole."
"Seriously, did Colonel Jackson tell you about Brownsville?"
"Yeah."
"I couldn't do anything for the others. They were dead when I woke up."
"Woah, man. Chill. No one thinks you did anything but everything you could. The colonel had nothing but praise for you. I know you, bro. I know you wouldn't flake.
Delling's opinion meant more to him than he'd realized.
"What do you think is going on?"
"I have no idea. If it wasn't for the part at the end, about the other guy looking like you – and the hole in the air, of course – I'd say it was just some white supremacist militia group. That doppelganger thing kind of freaks me out, though."
"How the hell do you think I feel about it?" Harrison shook his head. "The other guy seemed really freaked out when he saw me, too. He could have finished me off, but he just kept kicking me and screaming that I couldn't exist. That was the weird part."
"Doesn't sound like he was a plant, then. If he'd had surgery to look like you, then why get upset when he saw you?"
"Not only that, but he sounded like me, too. Had the same scars on his face. This guy was me. Seriously freaky shit, man."
"They didn't find his body?"
"No, they didn't. He must have escaped, I'm thinking through that hole in the air."
Project Brimstone Page 2
