Time Square Militarized Zone

The fire from the sudden battle had been put out, but a part of the military complex had been destroyed. There were losses on the US Army’s side, and a makeshift medical tent had been put together to take care of the injured soldiers. The bodies had been collected and set aside for pickup in yet another tent. One of the bodies, however, was on a gurney covered by a white sheet, being wheeled by two privates in fatigues across the base to the largest white tent closest to the tower.

The two soldiers saluted the officers upon entering the tent, set the gurney in the center of the room, saluted the officers again and left.

“What are we looking at?” the older of the men in uniform in the room asked.

“Something unprecedented, I’m certain!” a man in a lab coat exclaimed. “What little secrets will he give us?”

The man in the lab coat laughed, and the men in uniform looked visibly irked by that.

“Doctor Klamp,” the older officer said.

“Oh! I apologize. My enthusiasm at the possibilities took the better of me. We’ve ascertained that this is the individual that attacked the base with, what we believe, some sort of power. From what we saw, he seemed to have the ability to create explosions out of thin air.”

“Is he human?”

“He certainly seems so, but we won’t know more until we do a full autopsy on the corpse.”

“As fast as possible, doctor. And just to be safe, collect his fingerprints and run them through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System). If he is human, we need to know how this happened.”

“Immediately, sir,” Doctor Klamp replied.

The men left the white tent and headed for a black tent nearby. In it, there were four long picnic tables with rows of computers on top of them. Each computer had a soldier assigned to it. There was a large TV monitor at the very front of the tables. The drone footage captured in the fight was playing on the monitor.

“Attention!” a soldier yelled when the officers entered the tent, and every other soldier stood up from their computer and saluted the group.

“At ease,” the older officer said. “First Lieutenant Gutierrez.”

“Sir!”

First Lieutenant Gutierrez was the leader of that specific intelligence squad in that base. His soldiers were in charge of manning drones and scouring the city for any extraordinary activity. When the tower rose in NY, a lot of the soldiers assumed it was another terrorist attack, but when they found out that towers had appeared in other countries as well, the assumption changed to an extraterrestrial invasion. To First Lieutenant Gutierrez, he was the first line of defense in a war against the unknown. In the time that they had been in NY, that day was the first time the base had been attacked, and on top of that, there had been casualties. In his mind, he had let the enemy in, so he was ready to rectify his mistake.

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“We are dealing with the unknown, lieutenant, but I have my suspicions. Have your men cross reference all accounts from the missing people. If there is the slightest ping of a credit card purchase or any other trace from someone that was supposed to be missing, come to me immediately.”

“Sir!” Lieutenant Gutierrez turned to his men in front of the computers and said, “You heard the Lieutenant Colonel. Bring up the missing persons list from New Year’s. Eliminate any known deceased and search for any activity. I don’t care how you do, just do it!”

“Yes, sir!” the soldiers replied in unison.

“I’ll find you immediately, sir,” Lieutenant Gutierrez told the officer.

“Very well. We will not let today repeat itself, lieutenant.”

“No, sir. We will not!”

Meanwhile, Doctor Klamp had already started the autopsy on the corpse in his lab. The man seemed to be in his twenties. There were, what he assumed, gang tattoos all over his body. His teeth had characteristics of those from meth users: stained black and crumbling. There were also scars on his arm where needle marks would be, but they seemed to have healed over time.

“Caucasian male around twenty years old. Damaged tissue and physical indication of drug use. Cause of death: gunshot. Subject was seen using unknown abilities before demise. Purpose of autopsy: ascertain any structural changes to the subject's body and any potential extra-human characteristics.”

Doctor Klamp grabbed a pair of scissors and started cutting the clothes off the body. The man was wearing rags, and they practically crumbled against the sharpness of the scissors. After that, he started studying every part of the man’s skin, eyes, nose and mouth. He took tissue samples of each one of those parts. When he felt he had done enough with the outside of the body, he grabbed a saw and proceeded to open the man’s chest cavity.

The autopsy went on for hours, and Doctor Klamp made sure to collect samples of everything. Tissue and blood were sent in for immediate analysis while he continued to weigh the organs, each of which he scraped a piece off to analyze under the microscope. Aside from the man’s charred fingers, he found no other anomalies.

The doctor was frustrated by the lack of information, and the only thing he had been able to find was the man’s identity. His name was Justin Lynch. He had grown up in foster care and had been in and out of jail for assault, attempted robbery, theft, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, possession and intoxication. The only reason why he had been added to the missing person list was because he had missed a meeting with his parole officer, and the parole officer had notified the police, who had been unable to find Justin Lynch.

A few days later, when the results of all of the analyses had come back, Doctor Klamp wrote his report and sent it to the Lieutenant Colonel. He was frustrated by the altogether lack of information, but there was nothing he could do. The man on the gurney had been completely normal.

Lieutenant Gutierrez had his team continue their search nonstop for a few days as well. The soldiers started rotating shifts, so the computers were always on, and they were always trying to cross names off the list. Going over a hundred thousand names was a terribly daunting task, and though they programmed a software to search for the names specifically across all known government databases as a daily routine, they attempted to do their own searches on family assets, bill payments and cell phone usage.

By the end of the week, Lieutenant Gutierrez was feeling like he had failed again, like he had let potential threats escape through his fingers.

“Sir! We’ve got a ping!” a soldier yelled suddenly.

Lieutenant Gutierrez recomposed himself, reenergized by the information, walked up to the soldier and asked, “Are you certain, soldier?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Walk me through it. Everything.”

“Yes, sir.”