Chapter 9
Intelligence has always been a treasure sought by men, although not always in equal measure. Some men want to know everything; others just want answers. The only thing they have in common is that they never know what to do with intelligence once they have it. Peering into the dark of a silenced tomb, he wondered whether the crafted man inside suffered such a weakness.
The hills were scorched; fire clung to patches of dirt in ways that didn’t make sense. Aftershocks rumbled through the earth, serving alongside the looming danger of additional rockslides as a reminder of an explosion that registered on the Richter scale. The worst thing, though, was the bodies. Men, women, and animals were scattered about at random in various conditions, ranging from totally unscathed to damn near skeletal. The origin point of this mess? An old cabin. An untouched old cabin, abandoned with dinner still on the table. All the hell sealed up in these hills stopped at the doorstep.
Trent Phillips could feel someone’s eyes boring into the back of his head, even if no one was there every time he checked. He was sure the Italians weren’t happy with him; there’d been no shortage of misunderstandings and ass-chewings on this trip—in town, on the ride up, during the walk here. He hadn’t exactly made any new friends, but that wasn’t why he was here. Nor was this feeling the kind he’d get from a few disgruntled cops, but as things were, he’d have to ignore it.
The body he was kneeling over was an old man with no obvious cause of death. He looked more like he was taking a nap. The next one over, maybe 20 feet away, was mostly bone, with only enough muscle and skin wrapped around the bits that usually move to imply that it might have been doing just that. He took pictures, cut away some samples, and moved on to his next item of interest: one of the several golden-hued flames clinging to otherwise completely inflammable dirt. He held his hand over it—no heat. He offered it a napkin from his briefcase—no spark. So he touched it. Nothing, like it wasn’t even there. Trent walked back over to the old man, apologized, and cut off one of his fingers. The flame took to the finger like it was gasoline. The newly fueled inferno licked harmlessly at his elbow as the finger began to degrade in the apparent heat. Trent smiled, then checked over his shoulder again before taking more pictures and carefully placing the burning finger in a self-pressurizing sensitive materials transport device, or “flask,” that he quickly returned to his briefcase.
Dirt samples, blood samples, body samples, a stew sample from the cabin—which was delicious—and photos of every conceivable thing from every angle possible. The sun was setting, and the now-bored Italian police were ready to go home. For them, this would be some great mystery, an impossible story for around the dinner table and campfire. For Trent? It was another important cobblestone along the road to stopping a monster. A monster he otherwise knew very little about, but something he would have plenty of time to reflect on during his journey home.
The jet had been privately booked by the agency; it had to be. Trent could not be away from his possessions for the length of the trip, no one was to examine them, and no one could know his name or purpose. Effectively, he was a government-sanctioned ghost. The trip was long, lonely, and quiet. A nap would be nice, but then he wouldn’t have his eyes on his belongings. Big no-no. The plane finally landed on some “private” airstrip in the middle of nowhere. Four men in suits escorted him to a new jet, and this process repeated, this time four times over about 17 hours, before he saw a familiar face. Former Army Captain Mike Gallagher, “Roll Call,” hopped down from a helicopter and took Trent’s hand in a stiff handshake. “Agent! It’s been a while! How’ve you been? How’s the wife and kids?” Trent’s shoulders sagged.
“Roll Call, I...”
“Can’t answer any questions. I know, I know.” He pushed a headset into Trent’s free hand. “I just like to be friendly, I guess. Oh well, hop on in. She’s a Yankee this time, brand-spanking new.” He slapped the side. “Either you’re coming back with something important or I’m just a very lucky boy.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Roll Call was indeed a lucky man, even if he didn’t know it. Somehow or another, he was the only pilot alive the government trusted for this leg of the trip, and if the other guys in the Brain were right, he was one of the only men that knew the actual location of the facility. If that were true, lucky might not be the right word.
The flight was short, 20 minutes or so, and Roll Call pulled away as soon as Trent was clear of the chopper. At the edge of this patch of grass sat a dilapidated house, at this point mostly consumed by the woods. At its side, a pair of rusting steel doors indicative of a storm or fallout shelter. Through those doors, down a hallway, onto a high-speed elevator with two buttons. Trent pushed the down arrow and the elevator lurched to life. The door opened into the security checkpoint, and the guard walked him through the check-in: a face scan, handprint scan, retina scan, blood match. The computer kicked out a badge, and the guard passed it to him. “Welcome back to paradise, Mr. Andrews.”
“Thank you, 34.” Trent took the badge with a smile. He had a lot in common with the man; they had both signed on to some ultra-classified government program, they lived here on site with no outside communication, and they had no idea who any of their coworkers really were. All the guys in the Brain had aliases; all the guards in the barracks had numbers, and they weren’t allowed to call each other anything else.
The Brain was quiet. It was late, and everyone else was in bed. Trent sat down at a computer and began downloading the photos and notes he’d brought back. He placed his samples in jars, weighed them, and split them for chemical trials. Then he removed the flask from its mount in his briefcase, set it on the desk, and stared at it. He’d made two leap hypotheses in the field. The first was that the fire had a purpose: it burned nothing but the dirt where it sat, and then the finger he provided it with. In that, he believed the first hypothesis to be true. His second assumption, however, might not have been more than a fleeting hope in the moment. He believed that the fire would burn as long as it had a purpose, that it needed no other fuel, that maybe that dirt it was sitting on hadn’t always been dirt. Trent depressurized the flask, and when the lid came free, golden fire spewed out—only for a moment before it returned entirely to the flask, chewing away at a small pile of dirt at the bottom.
Trent flinched as the printer by the computer he was using cranked to life. It was a new take on an old device, a dot matrix printer. It spat out paper from a roll instead of individual sheets, re-rolling the output onto a new core before cutting it away. Trent examined the output. To him it was senseless: random strings of numbers, letters, and symbols. But he knew exactly what it was. It was the pictures he’d taken, the notes he’d written, run through that computer and boiled down into a “simple” text input only another computer could hope to make heads or tails of. So he pulled the roll from its shaft and made his way down to the door on the other end of the Brain.
The badge scanner beeped, and the two-sided steel door silently slid away, then back into place behind him. Down a long, well-lit, camera-studded hallway sat another door that also silently opened before him and closed in his wake. The boys called this room “the Forge.” It was small; the only thing in it was a chunky old CRT computer monitor built into the wall, a typewriter-style keyboard jutting out in front of it, and a little office-style name placard on the small desk space to its side: “Hephaestus.” Trent placed the roll on the ground and walked up to the keyboard. “Hello, Hephaestus.”
The monitor flashed for a moment before spelling out a response. “Hello, doctor.”
“I have input for you. Printer-based.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
A small portal slid open and a scanner emerged. Trent mounted the roll to the scanner arm and fed the beginning of the roll into the scanner. The paper began to fly into the device at blinding speed. The monitor began flashing, the only way Hephaestus had to get his attention, so he walked over and pressed a key to acknowledge it. Hephaestus “spoke” to him again. “Apologies, doctor, you appear to have inserted the roll upside down.” Trent flinched. The scanner automatically shredded input as it received it, but the monitor immediately flashed again, so he pressed a key.
“That was a joke. This is new information, doctor. I very much look forward to the results of your work with the samples. For now, you’ve given me much to work with. Thank you. Is there anything else you would like from me before you go?”
Trent punched “No.” into the keyboard and spun on his heel. As he walked the path from the Forge to the Brain, he reflected on Hephaestus’ joke. That little monitor belied the size and scope of that device, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it having a sense of humor.