THE TEMPERATURE HAD dropped significantly overnight and when Gordon first stepped outside his tent that morning, it almost felt like a slap in the face. The chilled air, combined with a strong cup of coffee and a hot breakfast, helped to clear his jet-lagged mind.
Gordon and Wilkinson walked side by side up the dirt road leading to the Crimm trailer. The last leaves of fall lingered, the forested rolling hills around them colored in fiery oranges and reds. Morning dew still saturated the air.
“You wanna get out of that monkey suit? I’m sure we’ve got something in your size,” Wilkinson remarked, appraising Gordon’s restrictive wardrobe -- white shirt, maroon tie, gray flannel trousers, tweed blazer.
“I’m good, thanks,” Gordon replied dryly.
“You’re a better man than me. I haven’t willingly worn a hangman’s rope around my neck in years,” Wilkinson said as he grabbed his neck reflexively. “The last time I had--“
“I have something,” Gordon interjected. He despised small talk. He had learned the script through the years, but had little patience for adhering to it.
“Go on.” Wilkinson paused, allowing Gordon his undivided attention.
“Yesterday I made a list of possible theories for the dematerialization of the Crimms and an inquiry regarding one of the theories early this morning.”
“Dematerialization? You make it sound like they evaporated into thin air.”
Gordon responded with a shoulder shrug as he pulled the crumpled notebook page from his pocket and handed it to the Lieutenant General, who eagerly absorbed every word.
“Well,” Wilkinson thought aloud, “we’ve already considered and ruled out one and two...combed the entire county and state, and the kid has been subjected to some heavy psychological analysis and profiling. His story checks out. I gotta be honest with you, the rest of the list is a little outside my wheelhouse. Start with the inquiry you made.” He handed Gordon back the list and they continued walking up the road.
“I phoned an associate of mine in Moscow to discuss a Russian physicist named Dr. Dmitry Zolkin. A brilliant man, but his research is -- let’s just say, interesting.”
“And?”
“And apparently Zolkin went missing seven months ago.”
“Missing?” Wilkinson’s curiosity was piqued.
“He stopped showing up to his lectures at Saint Petersburg State University and no one has seen him since.”
“Why is he of interest?”
“Early in his career he did some highly theoretical and experimental work related to the human soul, commonly referred to as the Dusha Theory.”
“I thought you science types don’t believe in souls.”
“Well, Zolkin does. He believes that the energy of the human soul, Dusha, is immeasurably powerful. According to his theory, the only way to capture that energy is upon its departure from a dying body, making the research itself morally questionable.”
“I’ll say. And how does this relate to the Crimms?”
“If you look at the list, every one of those theories -- wormholes, particle beam weapons, anything -- would involve a source of power far beyond anything within our current inventory. Anti-matter could be the only other feasible possibility, if it didn’t cost over twenty-five billion dollars a gram to make. Beyond that, it’s almost impossible to store since it reacts with any matter it comes into contact with, annihilating both itself and the container. We’re years if not decades away from fully understanding it.”
“What makes you think this Dusha energy is any different?”
“There were rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Well, Zolkin left academia for a number of years. Some believe he was conducting his Dusha experiments on prisoners in remote Siberian jails...at the request of the Russian government.”
“Christ, if the Russians have this in their hands, we’re all screwed. In your opinion, is this Dusha stuff even possible?”
“Zolkin is a brilliant physicist.”
“Then we’ll have to find him, won’t we?”
•••
Fletcher Crisp was fast asleep in room number thirteen at the Dewdrop Inn. The motel hadn’t seen a decor change since the late seventies, and was awash in mustards, dull greens and cheap wood paneling. The owl patterned bedspread, matched cream colored sheets and pillows were all laid in a heap at the foot of the bed. After all, an Englishman need look no further than Lord Jeffrey Amherst and the smallpox blankets to learn of the dangers of communal bedding. Fletcher slumbered atop the bare queen-sized mattress cocooned in a high-altitude mummy sleeping bag.
Five hours earlier, he had returned from his expedition damp, tired and chilled to the bone. He hurriedly shed his wet clothing before examining the wound on the palm of his right hand, a two-inch clean, straight laceration. The blood had clotted, but it would require stitches.
He rustled through a bathroom vanity drawer, unearthing a complimentary sewing kit, which he set down on the nightstand next to an empty glass. He poured and downed three fingers of vodka from his silver hip flask that was proudly engraved with the SAS emblem of a downward-pointing Excalibur wreathed by flames and bearing the motto “Who Dares, Wins.” He poured another and immersed both the needle and thread in the glass of vodka, allowing them to disinfect while he scrubbed his wound clean in the bathroom. After thoroughly drying his hands, he removed the needle and thread from the glass and casually closed the laceration with ten easy stitches. Didn’t flinch once.
Fletcher reached for his backpack and removed the enigmatic pyramid from the lead-lined storage bag. It was far heavier than it appeared. He ran his handheld radiation detector over it. Nothing out of the norm. He slowly rotated the pyramid on the palm of his good hand, examining it from all angles. The unusual matte finish absorbed light like a deep-space black hole. He set it down on the nightstand, fired up his laptop and proceeded to upload the photos from his camera to a private Veritas Bellum server. Not one to watch progress bars, he jumped in the shower. Unfortunately, the Dewdrop Inn’s lone water heater had already exhausted itself for the day, so he resigned himself to the lukewarm shower, toweled off, crawled into his mummy bag and fell into a deep sleep.
The phone rang. And rang again. “Hello,” Fletcher said, fighting off a yawn.
“Mornin’, Mr. Crisp, this is yer wake-up call,” Cooter Boone said in his thick Appalachian drawl. He had one hand on the red rotary phone handset and one on the remote for the nineteen-inch TV mounted in the corner of the reception area. He couldn’t decide whether he wanted to watch a rerun of Kate Plus 8 or The Real Housewives of Miami.
“Morning,” Fletcher replied.
“You have a good one now.”
“You too, Cooter.”
“Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”
“I can assure you the creek levels are just fine, a little cold, but fine,” Fletcher remarked as he hung up the phone, amusing only himself. He deftly maneuvered out of the sleeping bag and walked over to his laptop. The email he was anticipating was sitting in his inbox.
From: veritas 213 <veritas213@veritasbellum.com>
Subject: Dust Photos
Date: November 2, 2015 4:22:13 AM EST
To: veritas103@veritasbellum.com
Photos are amazing. Too explosive and incriminating for both you and Veritas to leak on our site first. Have already distributed via the alternate channel. Over 50,000 hits on WorldOrderUnderground.com in 4 hrs. This is big. Great work, see you this evening. Your flight details are as follows:
Charleston (CRW) to Denver (DEN), Friday, November 2, 2015 - Flight F9 371
Departs Arrives Check-in
06:15 PM 07:50PM FRONTIER (F9), Terminal Unknown
Denver (DEN) to Burbank (BUR), Friday, November 2, 2015 - Flight F9 417
Departs Arrives Check-in
08:40 PM 10:03 PM FRONTIER (F9), Terminal Unknown
Fletcher powered up his laptop, directing the browser to WorldOrderUnderground.com, one of the most popular conspiracy-oriented sites on the net. He had visited the site on dozens of occasions, but each time he opened the homepage, it never failed to crash his eyeballs. No wonder people don’t take this stuff seriously, he thought as he attempted to navigate through the impossibly meandering, cheap, garish website. It took him a minute, but he finally found his story. It looked like the view count had already bettered one hundred thousand.
Update On Dust, WV “Anthrax” Story
By Jerry Goodspeed
11-2-15
You’ve all seen the video out of Dust, WV of the crazy pulsing blue light by now. And you’ve all heard the story the Army’s putting out that it has something to do with the Anthrax-making Crimm family and a blown power transformer. But what you haven’t heard is that it’s all a ruse...and we have the proof. One of our sources has just sent us the following images of the Anthrax trailer which is where the entire Crimm family were allegedly infected with their own bio-weapon, before succumbing last week. As you can see, those are U.S. Army soldiers walking in and out of the trailer and not a single one of them is wearing a biochem suit or gas mask, while at the South entrance to Dust (where the mainstream media are still camped out), the troops are running around in hazmat suits getting showered off in Decon Tents. Something doesn’t add up.
Our insider also reports that not only is the Anthrax story a cover, but the real story is that the entire population of Dust disappeared into thin air on the night of October 30, 2015. Can anyone say Qinling Mountains? More to come...
It will do. He’d rather that CNN were running the story, or even his friend Suzy from the bar, but you take what you can get. He wanted the truth out there, whatever it might be.
•••
Gordon stood alone in the middle of the Crimm trailer, arms hanging at his sides, like a young schoolboy awaiting either direction or discipline. Wilkinson had dismissed all of the military personnel in the area so Gordon could proceed unhindered, but the silence itself was proving to be the distraction. Everything was just a little too still.
The trailer was scheduled for demolition later that day, unless Gordon found a reason to delay that schedule. The media was to be informed that an explosive device had been discovered in the trailer and EOD would be brought in to safely handle the detonation. The last thing the Army wanted was for the Crimm trailer to become some sort of mecca for conspiracy theorists after the inevitable pullout.
Gordon had already studied the scientific data pulled from the trailer and the surrounding area and felt confident that his untrained investigative eye would be of little help. He felt ill-equipped for the task at hand. Top physicist, yes, but he was no Sherlock. Was he really their best option? Gordon knew such questions led one down treacherous unlit paths, and quickly turned his thoughts back to the trailer.
The living conditions were eye-opening.
By Dust standards, Gordon had been raised in opulence in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, home of the U.S. Army and NSA intelligence complex. His mother, Margaret, had created a handsome home out of the less than inspiring on-base military housing. She was there to greet him every day after school and he never wanted for a home-cooked meal or freshly baked treat.
This was different, so different that it was difficult for Gordon to process. He had seen low-income housing before, but this was different – this was truly no-income housing.
The filth was what really shocked him. Soiled clothing, tattered furniture, grease-smeared walls...garbage everywhere. It looked as though someone had recently thrown a plate of spaghetti against the paneled trailer wall and decided to let it dry there. In certain circles it may have passed as a modern art piece, but in Dust, it was a way of life.
Gordon rummaged through some of the Crimms’ remaining belongings, but it was clear to Gordon that whatever happened to the Crimms had come as a complete surprise to them.
As Gordon exited the trailer, he noticed something strange. The area was heavily forested, yet there was no sign of a single bird, squirrel or living creature to be seen or heard, anywhere.
•••
Gordon and Wilkinson entered the elaborate combat support hospital that had been established on the outer perimeter of Base Camp. The interior’s white arched mylar walls, stainless steel medical equipment and tubular fluorescent lighting, brought to mind the set of a futuristic sci-fi film.
With the initial confusion and complexity surrounding the case, the Army opted for subscribing to the “more is more” principle; the CSH could easily accommodate upwards of fifty patients at any given time. The overkill looked better for the press and helped to support the “official” story, that all twenty-three residents of Dust had succumbed to anthrax. At this point, as far as the media was concerned, the hospital was functioning as a morgue, and young Caden Crimm’s body was among those corpses.
In reality, Caden sat in an armchair adjacent to his regulation hospital bed. He was engrossed in a braille version of the The Hunger Games, having all but devoured the book in two days. He imagined himself hunting and foraging in District 12. He too, knew what it was like to go hungry.
“Good afternoon, Caden. My name is John and this is my friend Dr. Gray.” Wilkinson gently laid his hand atop the boy’s shoulder.
“Hi.” Caden looked up from his book in their general direction. The only clue to his blindness was his sincere gaze that never quite seemed to hit its target.
“Would it be alright if we ask you some questions?”
Caden shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I reckon. I might not know too many answers, cause I ain’t done no schoolin’ in a spell.”
“I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Dr. Bennett says you’ve picked up braille very well.” Wilkinson’s spirited tone sounded about as natural as a tuba in a string quartet.
“Yes sir. Y’all read thisn’?” Caden proudly held up his copy of The Hunger Games.
“I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“It’s a goodin’. I clean forgot summa tha words, but I love it anyways,” Caden said, with a big smile on his face.
Gordon cleared his throat. Enough with the chit-chat. “Caden, can you tell me if you felt anything strange in the air on the night your family disappeared?”
“If you mean did it feel like a bug zapper, yes, it did.”
“Can you explain that to me a little more?”
“Like ‘bzzzt’ -- dead bug.” Caden made a hand gesture of a bug flying into a bug zapper and dropping dead.
“The air felt electric?”
“Dunno, cause we ain’t got nary none.”
“Bug zappers?”
“No ‘lectricity.”
“Okay, well do you remember anyone saying anything when you heard the loud sound?”
“I could only hear Grandma Boo sayin’, ‘the light, the light, the light’ and then just nothin’.”
“One last thing, Caden. Are there normally a lot of birds and animals in the trees around your house, or is it generally pretty quiet?”
“No sir, it’s real loud. All kinds of birds and critters, and I can always hear them ‘coons chuckin’ in the stump behind the trailer.”
Was his hunch correct? The weapon had dematerialized everything with a pulse within a given radius...except for the kid. The thought brought to mind the old English proverb, “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” Perhaps the weapon was able to detect optic nerve transmission? It seemed an odd parameter to target, but “odd” seemed to be the norm in Dust.