“Is it moving?” Quinn asked the helicopter pilot. He had to shout into his headset to be heard over the noise.
“Outward in all directions,” the man shouted back. “Faster toward the east.”
Quinn unhooked his harness and moved to the next seat for a better look out the east-facing side. The dark sky overhead threatened rain, which was already falling in sheets near the horizon, obscuring what lay beyond. He saw flashing lights and looked down on a cluster of police cruisers and firetrucks blocking an intersection, keeping residents and onlookers at bay.
The pilot blew a bubble with the gum in his mouth, and the sound popped in Quinn’s ear.
“And it was first reported this morning?” he asked.
“That’s what they told me. Some family woke up to find that thing eating their house.”
The helicopter fluttered noisily over the border of the anomaly. From that height, it looked like the iris of a massive human eye. A bulbous outer mass, like metallic charcoal, traced a furrowed oval almost two miles across at its widest point. It sloped down quickly at its inner edge and dissipated to a web of interconnected strands, like heavy vines, that grew ever more sparse until they all but disappeared amid the colorless landscape of the interior. At first glance, everything inside the massive oval seemed like it had been burned. But it hadn’t. The sparse trees still had leaves. Tufts of grass sprouted along a creek bed. But all of it was duller somehow, as if some essence had been sucked from it, and that made it hard to discern any detail.
“Can we go lower?” Quinn asked.
“Sorry.” The pilot shook his head as he chewed. “No can do.”
Quinn glanced to the console next to the pilot. The man had raided a pack of nicotine gum. Judging from the torn foil, he was chewing at least four pieces.
“Comm check,” a technician urged over the radio. Her voice crackled with static.
“Comms holding,” the pilot replied.
“Why?” Quinn shouted over the helicopter noise.
“Thing’s radioactive.”
“How radioactive?”
“Dunno. But it messes with the navigation and radio. I have orders—this is as low as we go.”
Quinn bit back his first response. “Then what exactly was I supposed to see?” he asked instead.
“That.” The pilot pointed.
To their left, in the middle of a field far inside the anomaly, several jagged spires grew at odd angles from a central point. Upon noticing them, Quinn immediately spotted several more, smaller structures that his eyes had mistaken for dead trees. He raised his phone and used the camera to zoom. The motion of the helicopter made it hard to keep a steady focus, but he was able to make out several dark, angular spires. They were very thin and grew obliquely, zigzagging in a kind of saw-blade pattern as they radiated up and out from a central point on the ground.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Alien antennas?” the pilot joked.
Quinn rebuffed the man’s attempt at humor. “I’m serious.”
The pilot only shrugged. “Used to be a cell tower there.”
“Used to? What happened to it?”
The man shrugged again, as if his feelings were hurt and he didn’t want to say, and the two men sat quietly for a moment as the helicopter flew nearly two thousand feet over the dull interior of the anomaly. Quinn saw an abandoned neighborhood. A small cluster of 1980s houses lined three parallel streets, each boarded and silent. Toward the southeast horizon, the rain was moving off, and he could just make out the gray silhouette of high-tension power lines.
“You said it’s moving faster to the east?”
The pilot nodded.
“Drawn to the power lines maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“How long before it reaches them?”
“You’d have to ask HQ. All I know is it’s gonna take quite a few houses before it gets there.”
It was true. Quinn could see the roofs of several dwellings poke above the foliage.
An alarm beeped, and the pilot banked the helicopter sharply to the right and flew back over the border of the anomaly. On a lonesome rural road, a scared family was being evacuated into the back of a white van. A child clutching a colorful toy looked up at the helicopter and turned to watch until it was out of sight. Quinn saw a large propane tank in the back yard. It would soon be swallowed, along with the family’s possessions—whatever couldn’t fit in their hands.
“Better take us back, then.”
“Hold on,” the pilot objected as the helicopter followed the furrowed edge of the massive oval. “You haven’t seen it yet.”
“Seen what?”
“Just watch. Shouldn’t be long now.”
Quinn turned back to the window and examined flat, charcoal-colored tendrils of the anomaly. Parts of it reflected light from the bleak, overcast sky with a faint rainbow sheen, like a film of oil on water.
He saw something then. Inside. Movement. Like a person, a child running for cover. Or maybe a dog. But they were too high to tell.
“Wait, go back,” he shouted.
But before the pilot could reply, the lights in the helicopter flickered as the entire surface of the anomaly’s outer mass lifted in spikes, like fine scales, which swayed. Ripples ran down the entire length as loud static burst through Quinn’s headset, which he ripped from his head.
The burst subsided as quick as it began, and he peered down just in time to see the bulbous anomaly surge outward a few more feet. And that was it.
“Jesus.” Quinn swallowed dry. He’d never seen anything like it. His skin felt prickly.
The pilot smiled as he smacked his gum. “Something, huh?”
Quinn turned back to where he thought he had seen the child. But there was nothing. If someone were hiding down there, they were gone. After scanning the landscape for them in vain, a thought occurred, and Quinn scowled. The pilot smiled back at him, waiting for his reaction.
“It’s different,” Quinn said. Somehow, the landscape had changed, although he couldn’t say exactly how.
“Yeah,” the pilot said. “It does that.”
Quinn stared out the window. “What the hell is this thing?”
“I thought you guys were supposed to tell us.”
The chopper landed in a clearing outside a cluster of tents and vehicles that served as a temporary crisis center. The makeshift headquarters stood on a small rise overlooking one part of the anomaly’s path, along with the nearby town. State and local police mixed with firemen and federal agents from the FBI and FEMA, several of whom who glanced at Quinn as he passed. A few did a double-take and smirked at his uniform.
He pulled out his phone and asked Ezra where he was. The reply was almost immediate.
ABOUT 20 MIN AWAY
STILL??
There was a long gap. And then:
I HAD TROUBLE CHARGING THE CAR
A pair of dark military helicopters burst over a rise and flew low over the encampment on their way to the anomaly. Quinn watched them go, just as the child had done to him.
“I made the same face,” a woman said.
Quinn turned and saw a uniformed black woman in her mid-50s leaning against a patrol car. She had a full, round face that matched her figure. She held a paper cup full of coffee in her hand and took a sip.
“They’re up to something,” she added, motioning with her coffee toward the retreating helicopters.
“They?” Quinn asked.
“Army. Got here about half an hour ago.”
Quinn noticed the large metal star pinned to her chest.
“You the sheriff?” he asked.
“Candace Landry, Angelina County.” She held out her hand.
He stepped forward and took it. “Orlando Quinn, Science Control.”
“So it says on your back.” She studied his uniform.
“Not pretty,” Quinn admitted. “But functional.”
“Is it true they won’t give you guys guns?”
“That’s the rumor,” he said flatly. “I don’t suppose you’re the one in charge?”
“HA!” Sheriff Landry laughed, nearly spilling her coffee. She nodded the far edge of the camp, where a prefab FEMA office sat overlooking an open field bordering the high-tension lines. “If it’s bigwigs you’re lookin’ for, they’re all in there.”
“Not you?”
“Wuddn’t invited,” she drawled sarcastically, as if playing the role of hick sheriff.
Quinn looked at the long portable building. The shades were pulled.
“Wrong color?” he asked, referring not to her skin but to the gradual parsing of the country into distinct factions, overlapping virtual states, one red, one blue.
“No. No gang colors here. We serve everyone in the county. Call me old fashioned, but I make my guys leave their politics at home. But if it bothers you that much, you could do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Let the bigwigs know the train outta Laramie’s been rerouted. It’ll give you an excuse for barging in. And save me from having to do it.”
“Will do.”
“Appreciate it.”
Quinn noticed the door to the HQ swing open then, and he watched a full-bird colonel and his two lieutenants stepping out. They were scowling. They didn’t look at him as they passed some yards away. They didn’t look at anyone.
“You’re right,” he told her. They were up to something.
“Ayup,” she said, watching them go. Then she nodded to the still-open door. “Looks like now’s your chance.”
Quinn flashed her a wry smile as he stepped away. “Sure you don’t wanna come?”
The sheriff laughed.
Inside the command center, Special Agent Roger Erving of the FBI stared grimly at a wide bank of screens. Quinn stopped when he saw him, surprised. His old boss turned and noticed Quinn’s uniform, and for a moment neither man knew what to say. Quinn looked down at his clothes. The arms and upper chest were a pale burnt yellow. The rest was dark blue-gray, except for a matching faint yellow stripe that ran down the pant legs. The material’s thick weave was supposed to be fire-retardant and abrasion- and acid-resistant, and it looked like it. It was stiff and unflattering.
“You should see the dress version,” Quinn joked.
Erving didn’t flinch. He simply held out his hand and Quinn took it.
“Is it true they won’t give you guns?” Erving asked.
He was shorter than Quinn’s memory made him out to be but no less imposing for it. His hands were large for his body, and he had a deep baritone that Nio had described as a jazz DJ’s.
“So I hear.”
“Nice to see you again, Agent Quinn.”
“You, too, sir,” Quinn said, reverting reflexively to the only address he had ever used.
“Then why is it you look like you just caught me in bed with your wife?”
Quinn laughed once. “Sorry. Just wondering how it is you’re here ahead of us.”
Special Agent Erving was based out of New York and oversaw the Bureau’s international and high-profile cases. Quinn’s career at the FBI hadn’t been remarkable enough to earn him such a prestigious placement. He’d only been seconded to Erving’s team as a kind of babysitter. They hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but Quinn respected him, which was probably why his brain had made Erving taller.
“It’s molting again,” the mixed-Asian woman behind Erving warned. She had her hair pulled in a pony tail and wore a light jacket that said FEMA.
On the main screen, the border of the anomaly rose in spikes again. Then it shuddered and jolted forward.
“Molting?” Quinn asked.
“That’s what we call it,” the woman explained, leaning over a tech to look at a screen. Her name tag said Nguyen. “The good news is, the time between episodes is gradually increasing. We think it might be slowing as it gets bigger. You the guy from Science Control?”
“Orlando Quinn. Crimes Division.” He stuck out a hand but the woman didn’t bother.
“Do we think this was a crime?” she asked without looking.
“Incident Commander Nguyen has operational authority,” Erving explained.
“In that case,” Quinn said, “you’ll want to know that the train out of Laramie has been rerouted.”
“Finally,” was all she said.
“Have you been able to get a sample?” Quinn asked after a moment’s silence.
“All our probes get eaten,” Erving said flatly.
“Eaten?”
“So far, all we know is that it’s radioactive. And growing.”
“What about knocking a piece off somehow?”
“Tried that, too,” Nguyen said impatiently. “We whacked it, torched it. The Bureau even shot it.” She didn’t sound happy about that.
“And?”
“The surface is like kinetic sand. Bullets make a brief dent but then just get absorbed and everything goes back to how it was.”
“And the blowtorch?”
Special Agent Erving shook his head. “Seems to disperse heat.”
“That’s it? That’s all we know?”
“Not necessarily. One of the pilots noted it’s eating the litter off the ground. There were some old washing machines in a ditch that are apparently no longer there.”
“Environmental group, maybe? Returning the land to its natural state?”
“That’s why the Bureau is here,” Nguyen drolled. “But so far, we have as much evidence that this is a terrorist act as we do it’s any other kind of crime.”
She meant none at all.
Quinn ignored her tone. “What happens when it reaches the high-tension lines?”
“It’s not the lines we’re worried about,” she said like she was tired of explaining. “It’s the hydroelectric plant they’re connected to.” She pointed to a map on a screen. “There are ten thousand homes, several hundred businesses, five hospitals, and a bunch of child care and nursing facilities in the flood plain. If the dam goes, a whole lot of people are going to lose everything. And if that’s not bad enough . . .” She scrolled the map to the north. “This is a jail serving eastern parts of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. Six thousand inmates, most with short sentences or being held pending trial. Some violent.”
“No way to move them in time?”
“Not to anywhere secure enough to hold them,” Nguyen corrected. “We can’t exactly drop them off at a school gym.”
“So, you’re fighting on two fronts,” Quinn said.
Nguyen nodded.
“And the army?”
“As it happens,” Erving interjected from the back, “the plant that builds the MOAB-C is in McAlester, Oklahoma, about an hour away by air. The National Guard have a C-130 standing by.”
“You’re gonna blow it up?”
“Part of it,” Nguyen said. “It’s already larger than the blast radius of any conventional weapon. But if we’re lucky, we’ll do enough damage to divert it from the dam.”
“What about the residences in the blast area?”
Quinn thought about the child he saw clutching the toy.
“They’re being cleared now.”
Quinn waited a moment, but nothing else came. “That’s it? You’re just going to blow up a bunch of people’s homes?”
“We’re doing what we can with what we have. We’ve gone through all our options.” Nguyen pointed.
On a white board, a hand-drawn grid of proposed actions was cross-referenced against various risks. The final column was a mathematical rank based on the numbers in the grid. Number one was “Explosive Ordnance.”
“There’s gotta be a better alternative than that.”
“Oh?” Nguyen practically laughed. “And what is that?”
“I don’t know in advance. But that’s why we’re here. This is our job.”
“You’re here because apparently you’re legally required to be. Our priority is to prevent the dam from failing and flooding the town. At this point, entertaining any other options only puts that at risk.”
“I’m not asking you to change the plan. Just give me as long as you can. That thing is, what, three, four hours from the dam? If we don’t find anything—”
“We have a viable plan.” Nguyen interrupted. “I’m not going to jeopardize it.”
“How would we be jeopardizing—”
“The outer border is two meters high!” The Incident Commander raised her voice and pointed toward the anomaly. “It stretches ten meters back. How do you plan on getting in without touching it? Pole vault? We can’t lower you from the air. If it molts, the chopper will lose power and crash, killing you and everyone on board. How will that help? And even if you could get in, then what? The anomaly is a level 3 radioactive hazard.”
“We don’t wear this uniform because it looks good, Commander.”
“And how are you going to get out? What happens if you or a member of your team gets hurt or trapped? Without reliable radio communication, we’ll have no way to know if you’re safe. We’re approaching final evac.” Nguyen pointed to a digital timer on the wall, which was counting down from 153 minutes. “If we drop on schedule, we still have time for another shot if something goes wrong.”
“So, don’t wait,” Quinn said. “Get a second plane in the air.”
She laughed. “Just like that, huh? Do you have any idea how much those bombs cost? Or what it took to get approval to drop one on American soil? Or the crazy route we have to fly so as not to take it over a heavily populated area? You don’t get it, Agent Quinn. We’ve spent all day working through the variables, identifying risks, developing contingencies. We’re talking hundreds of collective man-hours to get to this point, and you’re asking me to introduce a wild card at the last second. If you so much as sprain an ankle, we’ll have to abort the drop and put thousands of lives and billions of dollars of property at risk. Do you understand? You’re not going in there. That’s final.”
Quinn looked to Erving, but he was stone-faced. Quinn would’ve expected some kind of reaction, but there was nothing, as if he were deliberately holding back.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” the Incident Commander said, “we have a lot to do in the next two hours, and I don’t have time to give every Johnny-come-lately a personal briefing.”
With that, she stepped toward a high table near the back that was covered in papers.
“The commander has a lot on her plate,” Erving said a moment later.
“Yeah. I’m sure she does.” Quinn turned for the door.
“What are you gonna do?”
But Quinn didn’t answer. He exited the mobile command center in slow steps. He stopped at the bottom and looked up at the sky.
Sheriff Landry was talking to a few of her men at a patrol car with its lights flashing silently. She saw Quinn’s face and nodded grimly, as if she knew what had happened.
He strolled to her slowly, head down.
“I made the same face,” she told him, repeating her earlier words.
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“I just can’t shake the feeling that I saw this movie before.”
“What do you mean?”
A woman with a clipboard and a FEMA jacket hurried past and into an open-sided tent full of emergency kits. Each was packed inside a small red case with a shoulder strap. A moment later, she stepped out again and left the tent empty.
“How do we know no one’s inside that thing?” he asked.
“We don’t.” The sheriff took a deep breath and sighed. “But my guys are blocking all the roads, keeping the selfie sticks away. Since this hit the news, we have folks driving in—”
There was a loud squeak of brakes as a requisitioned school bus stopped across the makeshift parking lot and deposited its load of citizen-refugees among the newly erected tents. Quinn and Sheriff Landry watched the faces of the people as they stepped to the gravel.
“I need to get back to it,” she said.
Quinn nodded and watched her help direct the crowd to the shelters. Between the long legs of the adults, he caught a glimpse of the child he had seen from the air, still clutching her toy. She looked about with big eyes, clearly confused by all that was going on.
Quinn strode to the nearby tent and swiped one of the red emergency kits. Then he took a sandbag off a nearby pallet and carried both to the back of the gravel lot and behind a row of identical electric Humvees marked “FEMA” in bold white letters. After glancing back to make sure he was out of sight, he threw the backpack and the sandbag into the last vehicle in the row and slammed it shut.
A car peeped, as if someone was calling him on his subterfuge, and he spun to see a fancy self-driving rental car pull to a stop next to an ambulance. Ezra was on his phone in the back seat. His soft face looked all of twelve years old.
“Where’s your uniform?” Quinn asked as the kid got out.
“Oh. I didn’t know if that was one of those things that we didn’t really—”
“Get it,” Quinn ordered.
“What are we doing?”
“Just get the packs and put them in the back of the Humvee. Hurry.”
Ezra paused at first, as if he could tell something was wrong, but without a clear alternative, he did as he was told while Quinn searched the Humvee for the key fob and started the engine. After disabling the self-drive on a touchscreen, he told Ezra to get in.
The kid hesitated a moment, but Quinn didn’t wait. He backed the Humvee out of the line and stopped to put it in drive, and Ezra hopped in quickly.
As he drove them out of the lot and onto a state highway, Quinn videocalled the office switchboard from the touchscreen in the dash. Clo appeared sitting at her desk.
“Section 08,” she said without looking. She wore her usual narrow tie and dark suit coat rolled at the sleeves.
“Do you wear the same thing every day?”
She glanced to the screen as if to confirm Quinn’s face matched his voice. “How’s Texas?”
“Not good. Do we have the satellites yet? Manny was supposed to be installing a hard line to NOAA.”
It was a long shot. That hard line was one item on a very long to-do list.
“I dunno.” Clo saw something on her computer screen she didn’t like and cursed in French. “I’ll have to get back to you,” she said.
“You may not be able to.”
“Going somewhere?” Clo asked.
“Yes. In.”
Ezra’s head turned sharply.
“If you can get Trotsky a time series,” Quinn continued, “he might be able to reverse-estimate a point of origin. Or narrow it down, anyway.”
“I wish you all wouldn’t call me that,” Dr. Kripke pleaded.
“I need you two to pinpoint that location and find a way to get it to me. And hurry. We don’t have much time.” Then he ended the call.
Quinn slowed as the Humvee approached the first police roadblock.
“Stay cool,” he told Ezra, who practically froze, wide-eyed, as he realized what that meant.
But when the deputy saw the FEMA logo, he waved them on. Quinn raised a hand in greeting as they passed.
Ezra turned back once. Quinn could see his face.
“Look,” he said as he leaned forward to scan the horizon, trying to get his bearings. “I know we don’t know each other very well. And I know you’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
Quinn stared at the kid’s hand clutching the handle in the door.
Ezra let go. He rubbed his red palm, moist with sweat.
“And I know it’s only your second day. So, if you don’t think you can handle it, that’s fine, but now’s the time to say so.”
“Handle what?”
Quinn took a deep breath and sighed. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why’d you take this job? You’re some kinda whiz kid, right? Why not go make a lotta money in the private sector?”
“You sound like my parents,” Ezra said disappointedly.
“Maybe they’re not wrong.” Quinn turned and waited for an answer.
“I dunno. I guess I’m just not excited to wake up every day for no other reason than to make a lot of money.”
“A lot of people would be happy just to make a little.”
“Yeah.” Ezra got quiet. “I just don’t want my life to be only about that. I wanna do other things. Interesting things. I wanna help people.”
Quinn snorted.
He caught himself when he saw Ezra’s face. “No offense, kid, but not too many people would put ‘helping’ and ‘government work’ together.”
“But that’s what made this job so interesting,” Ezra objected, suddenly very engaged. “The department is totally new, so there’s a chance to do more than just administer policy. We get to interface with industry leaders and create something genuinely intelligent that could help people for a really long time—a model for the safe practice of science. I mean, that’s why Officer Galois’s here, right? And you guys consult all over the world.”
“Consult?” Quinn scowled. He thought a moment. “You mean the Brunei thing? That wasn’t nearly as fancy as the PR made it sound. We answered a few questions about how we were doing things. Shit, I made half of it up.”
“Really?”
After a moment, Quinn slowed and pulled onto a dirt road, where he stopped the car.
“Look, I don’t know what kind of recruitment speech the director gave you, if you thought this was a consulting gig or whatever, but this is the job. You wanna help people? Really? You don’t do it by ‘interfacing with industry leaders’ or chatting up the chief of police of Brunei or letting your car chauffeur you from the airport at a safe speed. This is how you do it. Right here.”
“By stealing a Humvee?”
Ezra regretted the sarcastic tone immediately. He took a deep breath, but before he could use it to defend himself, Quinn had removed the fob and tossed it to him. Then he got out and walked to the back, where he unloaded the packs.
“What are you gonna do?” Ezra asked, joining him.
Quinn bent to unzip his pack and check the gear. “You wanna know what the consequences are before you sign up. That it?”
“It’s just . . .” Ezra looked around like there might be a camera somewhere. “This isn’t what I thought we’d be doing.”
“Yup.” Quinn nodded sagely as he unfolded with the soft hood to his suit. “No industry leaders out here to interface with.”
There was no one, in fact. Ezra felt a drop and looked up at the dark clouds rolling overhead.
“You wanna know what’s going on here?” Quinn asked. “Really? You wanna know why we got called in so late and why they’re keeping the sheriff out? You wanna know why they won’t let anyone close to that thing or why the Army’s in such a hurry to blow it up, no matter how many people might get hurt or how many families will lose everything in the process?” He stood and pulled the pack over his shoulders. “You really wanna know that?”
“Yes.”
“Me, too.”
Quinn turned and headed into the grass.
Ezra watched him stomp through high weeds.
“But what are you gonna do?”