Ex-Patriots

Chapter 15 NOW

Smith helped Danielle out of the Black Hawk and guided her out from under the slowing rotors. Freedom held out a hand for Stealth, but she ignored him and walked after Smith. The wash from the helicopter blades whipped her cloak around her like a bonfire of black flames.

Project Krypton was a collection of brick buildings painted milky white in the middle of miles of sand and rocky hills. At first glance the base didn’t look that different from the dozen or so colleges or corporate campuses Danielle had spent time on, just with more lava rocks than grass. It wasn’t until she registered that everyone’s clothing was tan that it started to seem “military” to her.

A sergeant waved Smith over and he left Danielle standing on her own. The redhead looked at the open yard, the sprawling space between structures, and on the other side of the buildings, just a few hundred feet to the west, the three chainlink walls with gaunt figures pushing against the outside fence. Even with the huge open space, the sound of clicking teeth danced on the edge of her hearing.

Her arms pulled in tight around her. She turned to check on the armor, wondering how soon before she could get it back on, and saw Stealth a few feet away.

“It’s weird,” Danielle said, “being outside without the suit on. Outside somewhere else, y’know?”

The cloaked woman looked across the tarmac at Smith, then at one of the nearby buildings. “Perhaps we can arrange for you to wait indoors while they finish unloading.”

She shook her head. “I’ll wait until they finish.”

“I shall remain with you, in that case.”

“I’m okay,” said the redhead.

“You spend every waking moment in the Cerberus armor,” said Stealth, “and you sleep in a corner under your kitchen table. I am certain these exposed conditions are causing you no small amount of stress.”

“I said I’m okay,” Danielle repeated. “Stop trying to be nice. It’s creepy.”

A lieutenant with a white armband approached, flanked by two other soldiers. “Ma’am,” he said to Stealth, “I’m going to have to ask you to please surrender your sidearms while you’re on base.”

She turned her head to him. “I will not.”

The MP’s hand settled on his own weapon, and his partners raised their rifles a few inches. Danielle saw Stealth’s pose shift. “This isn’t a request, ma’am,” said the officer. “Hand over both of your sidearms.”

“John,” called Danielle. “We’ve got a problem.”

Smith jogged back over. “What’s going on?”

“This woman refuses to surrender her weapons, sir.”

Smith looked at Stealth’s elaborate double holsters and back to the MP. “She’s a guest of the colonel, Lieutenant…Furber,” he said with a clumsy glance at the officer’s name. “I don’t think this is necessary.”

The soldier’s hand was still at his pistol.

Smith turned to Stealth. “Look, you know how the military works. This guy’s willing to let you pummel him just so he doesn’t have to break procedure and disobey an order he got six months ago. Just let it slide for now and I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out in less than an hour.”

The cloaked woman stayed focused on the MP. “I will not.”

“Can you just do it for now? I swear, Colonel Shelly will get this all resolved in no time at all.”

The blank face of her mask turned to Smith, then back to Furber.

When her hands moved, it was too fast to see. The pistols were drawn and held out to the soldier, butt first, before any of them could register it. One of the other MPs jerked his rifle up out of instinct, a few moments too late.

“Jesus,” muttered Danielle.

Furber took a slow breath and retrieved both of the weapons. “Glock 18C,” he said. “Nice. I didn’t think you could get these in America.”

“I did not,” said Stealth.

“Ammunition?”

She pulled two extended magazines from alongside each of the thigh-mounted holsters and four more stored in a pair of rigid pouches on either side of her waist. Furber looked up and down her skintight uniform. “Do you have anything else you’d like to declare before—”

“If you attempt to search my person, I will break both of your thumbs.”

Smith stepped between them. “I think we’re good, don’t you?” He gave the MP a smile. “I’m sure the colonel will agree you’ve done your duty. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” said Furber. He and his squad made a quick retreat.

“So, the colonel’s running a couple minutes behind,” said Smith. “He should be here by the time we’ve got everything unloaded, and then we can see about getting you those back.” He squeezed Danielle’s shoulder and headed back over to the helicopter.

Stealth examined the triple line of chainlink fence a hundred yards away. Danielle watched the cloaked woman turn her head to follow the barricade. “Something bugging you? Besides being unarmed?”

“I am never unarmed, Danielle,” said Stealth. “You should know that. I count twenty-eight sentries along this section of the perimeter alone. There are another four in the towers and ten patrolling between the fences.”

Danielle shrugged and watched the soldiers give one of the Cerberus crates a nudge to make sure it was secure on their cart. “Not many more than we’ve got on the wall most of the time.”

The cloaked woman turned to examine the fence line to the east, almost half a mile away. “It would appear these numbers are consistent along their entire perimeter.”

“What’s your point?”

“When Zzzap did his reconnaissance, he indicated the base had limited personnel. His exact words were ‘a skeleton crew.’”

Danielle looked at the distant fence and tried not to think about all the open space. “Maybe they put everyone on just to impress us.”

“If they had the manpower to put such numbers on their perimeter, why would they choose not to do so on a regular basis?”

The redhead shrugged. “I’m sure they’ve got their reasons,” she said. “Besides, there’s only, what, thirty or forty exes out there. Hardly a threat against four dozen well-armed soldiers.”

“Yes,” said Stealth, “I had noticed the low numbers.”

“Once the full scope of the epidemic was clear, the Army took much more aggressive measures toward controlling it,” said Freedom. He’d moved up behind them. A few yards back, a pair of soldiers pushed the heavy cart laden with the Cerberus crates. Danielle walked over to inspect their loading job. “There were attempts to contain them, at first, but it came down to killing them. We used a backhoe to dig a few mass graves out there by the hills, and burned most of the ones we’d already contained.”

“Of course,” said Stealth with a faint nod of her head.

“It took a little over a year, but we cleared out a good chunk of the surrounding region. We’ve even made some headway into Yuma.” He looked down at her. “To be honest, ma’am, I’m surprised you haven’t accomplished more at your base.”

Danielle looked up from the crates. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No offense meant, ma’am,” he said. “I just thought, well, with your combined abilities I’d think Los Angeles would be a lot further on by now. It looked like there were a thousand exes just gathered around your base.”

“We estimate fifteen hundred on an average day.”

“Again,” said Freedom, “no offense meant, ma’am, but why haven’t you done anything about them?”

The cloaked woman stared at him. Danielle recognized the look and could guess what was coming next.

“We are at a sub-base on the Yuma Proving Grounds, correct? The city of Yuma is fifty nine miles south-south west of our current position.”

Freedom paused just for a moment. The corners of his mouth twitched with grudging respect. “That’s correct, ma’am.”

“So the area you ‘cleared out’ with your superior numbers and weaponry consists of the mostly-empty proving ground and the outskirts of a small city, population ninety thousand, less than fifty thousand of which would have transitioned according to all known statistics regarding the ex-virus.”

The smile flattened out. “Correct again. Ma’am.”

“There are over five million ex-humans within the city limits of Los Angeles,” said Stealth “This is one hundred times the numbers you have dealt with, and does not include the greater Los Angeles county area. If we had killed one hundred exes a day, every day, for the past nineteen months, we would have only eliminated one percent of the undead population of the city.” She paused to let the numbers sink in. “We have better uses for our time and resources.”

“I apologize, ma’am.”

“Why did you say most of them?”

Freedom blinked. “Ma’am?”

“When you were explaining the Army’s aggressive stance, you said you burned most of the ones you had contained. What did you do with the ones you did not burn?”

He set his mouth in a line and stared at her blank mask. When she didn’t budge, the huge officer leaned back on his heels. “The project director, Doctor Sorensen, asked us to get him some live specimens, so to speak.”

“What did he require these specimens for?”

Freedom straightened up to his full height. “The doctor’s a genius in the fields of neurology and biochemistry, ma’am. He was trying to determine the nature of the ex-virus and determine if anything could be done for the people who’d been afflicted.”

“And what did he determine?”

“I couldn’t say, ma’am. I’m a soldier, not a doctor.”

“This is everything, right?” interrupted Smith. He’d wandered back and was looking over the cart. “Nine crates altogether. Looks like we didn’t lose one between Los Angeles and here.”

No one returned his broad smile.

Danielle checked the boxes and gave a nod. “Everything looks good.”

“And here’s the colonel,” said Smith. He waved to a quartet of men. Freedom’s back went stiff and he delivered a sharp salute, as did the soldiers around him.

“As you were,” said the officer. He held out his hand. “Colonel Russell Shelly, commander of Project Krypton. On behalf of the United States Army, I’m honored to welcome you both to the Yuma Proving Ground.”

Danielle shook his hand. Stealth ignored it.

“You just missed your companion, Zzzap,” said Shelly. “He left about fifteen minutes ago. Did you get his messages?”

“If he had a full stomach he probably forgot to send them,” scoffed Danielle.

“Well,” said Shelly, “why don’t we get out of the sun? We could have lunch if you like. Or we’ve got a shop set up for you, Doctor Morris. Want to take a look and see if it meets with your approval?”

Smith cleared his throat. “Sir, there’s a matter of some weapons and ammunition. Miss…Stealth had her guns confiscated when we arrived.”

The colonel looked at her and his eyes dropped to her empty holsters. “Very sorry about that, ma’am. Standard procedure for wartime, you understand. My people are just as antsy about armed strangers as yours are.”

“Since she is a guest,” said Smith, “in the interest of diplomacy, I told her we’d get them back to her. Would that be okay, sir?”

He nodded. “Of course. Sergeant, find the officer on duty,” he said to one of his staff. “As soon as those weapons are processed at the armory, have them unprocessed and returned to our guest.”

“Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted and headed off.

“Why don’t we go look at the workshop,” said Danielle. “That’ll let me open the crates and check on the armor.”

“If you like,” said the colonel. He gestured them down a dusty concrete road. “It’s about a ten minute walk if you don’t mind conserving some gasoline. Mr. Smith gave us a list of what he thought you’d need. We got the last of it set up this morning.”

The cart with the crates caught on a rock and jammed to a stop. The two soldiers wrestled with it for a moment. Danielle stepped back to make sure none of the boxes had shifted.

“Not all of your soldiers have enhanced abilities,” said Stealth.

“That’s correct, ma’am,” Shelly said. “The ex-virus caught us in the middle of the program. When the President declared a national state of emergency, we barely had fifty soldiers through the process, plus Captain Freedom. We had a hundred and fifty or so washouts, plus another hundred and eight who were serving as our control group. In the time since, we’ve lost about half of those numbers.”

“Yet it would appear you have more than that serving here on base.”

“Some of them are survivors from other sub-bases like Lieutenant Gibbs here.” He gestured at a man walking with them in digital camos with a tiger-stripe pattern. “There’s just over thirteen thousand square miles to get lost on here at Yuma. When things got bad, everyone locked down where they could. A lot of them couldn’t. We were lucky Krypton had been built to be secure and self-contained. Once the situation stabilized, we started to expand, secure other areas, and find other units that had holed up. At the moment, I seem to be the senior officer left alive, so people from all branches are under my command.”

“And civilians?”

“There aren’t many civilians left, ma’am,” said the colonel. “We saved about eleven hundred people from Yuma.”

Danielle coughed. “That’s it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. There were a lot of folks who felt they were safer in their homes with a shotgun and a few pistols than putting themselves under military control. With our own limited manpower, it came down to picking our battles. We could rescue three or four willing families in the time it took to get one irrational resistor out of their home. So we did what we had to do, even if it meant some people got left behind.”

Stealth moved her head left to right. “Where are these civilians now?”

“Right here, ma’am.” Shelly nodded at the soldiers pushing the cart. “It was around New Year’s last year that we realized the solution to both of our problems. We were short on manpower. We had over a thousand civilians who needed organization and a way to contribute. Two birds with one stone.”

Danielle blinked and looked at the soldiers. “You drafted them all?”

Shelly shook his head. “No one was drafted. We had Smith explain the situation, so no one would feel coerced. He made the offer and seven hundred of them signed up. We ran four separate boot camps.”

“I would think the majority of the civilians would not have been viable candidates,” said Stealth.

“Not normally, no, but these aren’t normal times. We took anyone over sixteen and under forty-five.” He coughed. “Between you and me, more than a few of them did it just to get in shape. Here we are.”

The building was an oversized garage, first in a row of near-identical structures. Smith stepped forward and tapped a code on the keypad next to the main door and it began to roll open. “I used all your old codes,” he said to Danielle. “Do you still remember them?”

“Some,” she said. “It’s been a while since I needed to use a confirmation code for anything not related to the suit.”

He nodded. “Do you still have all the same passwords?”

She tried to look at Stealth out of the corner of her eye. “No,” said Danielle. “I changed a lot of them a year or so back.”

Shelly’s gaze shifted between the two women. “Why was that?”

Danielle shrugged. “I was bored. I was defragging the system one day and just switched the passwords for the heck of it.”

“For now,” said Stealth, “perhaps it is best if those passwords remain secret.”

Smith’s smile wrinkled and the colonel gave her a hard look. “Ma’am,” said Shelly, “I understand the past twenty-two months have not been easy for anyone, and they’ve forced us all into patterns of behavior we wouldn’t have in a peacetime situation. But I can’t help feeling like you’re one of those civilians who feels they’re a lot safer at home with their shotgun and pistols.”

“If that were the case, colonel,” said Stealth, “would I run the risk of being left behind?”

There was a brief silence. Then the door clanged open.

The space was large, as big as the scenery shop Danielle had turned into a workspace back at the Mount. The ceiling was dotted with half a dozen sunroofs, filling the area with natural light. A trio of large, rolling toolboxes stood in the center of the room near a few work platforms. Along the wall were some larger tools and tanks of gas for a welding set-up. “Very nice,” she said.

“If you need anything else, we can try to get it for you. Any special tables or racks for the armor can be constructed to your specifications.”

“Well, this is a good start,” she said. “I can use the foam molds in the crates for now.” She found a pry bar in one of the toolboxes and opened the smallest crate. It was the helmet. Her shoulders loosened at the sight of it.

Colonel Shelly looked down at the armored head and met its gaze. “Would you be up for a demonstration, Doctor Morris? Mr. Smith has been singing the praises of your armor for a few years now. I’ve seen some videos, but I’d love to see it in action.”

She looked at Stealth. The cloaked woman gave a slight nod from within her hood. “I’d need some help,” Danielle said. “Maybe half a dozen people with some electronics experience. Or at least some brute muscle that can follow orders.”

Shelly looked at Freedom and the huge officer gave a wry smile. “I believe specialists Wilson and Garfield fit that description,” he said. “I’ll put in a call. We should have a team for you in ten minutes, ma’am,” he told the redhead.

“Do you want a place to change into the undersuit?” asked Smith. “There’s an office and bathrooms over there.”

“No need,” said Danielle. Her fingers danced down the buttons of her shirt and pulled it open. Underneath was the skintight black Lycra mesh, studded with gleaming micro-contacts. She tossed the shirt aside.

Freedom smiled. “You wear your costume under your civilian clothes, ma’am?”

“It’s more convenient,” she said. “And it’s kind of a security blanket.”

They had half the crates open by the time the group of soldiers arrived. Four of them set up the legs while Danielle worked with Lieutenant Gibbs to assemble the codpiece. She found a ladder, lowered herself into the legs, and Freedom’s two super-soldiers got the torso locked together around her. The left arm went on without a problem, but there was some trouble with the right. By this point there was too much armor around Danielle for her to see the problem so she tried calling out instructions.

“Wow,” said Smith. He ran his fingers across the twisted metal on the battlesuit’s forearm. “What happened here?”

“A few months ago I got in a fight with another superhuman called Peasy,” said Danielle. “He ripped that M2 off and used it to club me in the head a couple of times. Wrecked the gun and the mounting, almost broke some of the optics, too.”

Stealth examined the damaged assembly. “What about this made it impossible to repair at the Mount?”

“Not much,” said Danielle. She tried to shrug, but buried in the inactive armor her tiny head just seemed to twitch. “Nothing. It just seemed like a waste of time to rebuild it after Peasy ripped off the old one. The barrel was bent, we didn’t have any more ammo for the guns, and…”

Smith looked up at her. “And…?”

She shrugged. “It felt like giving up,” she said. “If I was going to build things under half-assed conditions with iffy material, it meant I was accepting things were going to stay like this.”

The arm locked into place and they tightened down the bolts. One of the super-soldiers, Hancock, got the helmet balanced on a ladder while Gibbs made the final connections. He met Danielle’s eyes. “Is that all of it?”

She nodded. “Get the collar bolts done and stand back.”

The armored skull settled over her and the soldiers spun their allen wrenches. Hancock hopped off the ladder and pulled it away. The titan hummed with power and dozens of small hatches snapped shut across the armor, concealing the bolts. The collar slid together and the battlesuit’s eyes flared to life.

Cerberus flexed her fingers. “Much better,” she said. She made a point of looking down at Freedom. Then she stomped out into the sunlight. Colonel Shelly followed the battlesuit outside. All of the soldiers marched behind him except for Freedom. The oversized captain stood like a statue across from the cloaked woman.

“After you, ma’am,” he said.

Her cloak swirled around her as she strode out of the workshop.

Cerberus was holding a jeep in front of her at arm’s length. She set it down on the ground. “I’ve made a few adjustments, but at the last recorded test the suit could dead-lift nineteen-point-four tons. The armor can deflect sustained fifty caliber fire and can survive a direct RPG hit with minimal damage to the suit or the pilot.”

“Amazing,” said Colonel Shelly. He ran his eyes over the battlesuit’s armored plates. “Imagine if this suit had gone into production. Do you know what a company of these things could’ve done in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

“And this is still the Mark One system,” said the titan. “We’d planned out a few improvements for the Mark Two which we—”

“What is stored in that building?”

They all looked at Stealth. Her arm was pointing at the third structure in line after the workshop.

Smith’s smile appeared. “I’m not sure what you’re talking—”

“You have exchanged three glances with Colonel Shelly at times when Cerberus has turned toward that building. The first time you both looked at the building afterwards. At least one of you has looked at it each time since. What is stored there you are worried we will discover?”

“Ma’am, we’re less than an hour into this visit,” said Shelly. “You can’t expect us to be open—”

“Cerberus,” snapped Stealth.

Inside the suit Danielle shifted though her lenses. “It’s cooled to the point that I can’t make out any heat signatures inside,” said the titan. “I can hear some movement, though.”

“Open it,” ordered the cloaked woman.

The battlesuit took two steps forward and Freedom was in front of it. He set his huge hand against the armored chest. “Ma’am, I suggest you stand down.”

“Suggestion noted,” said Cerberus, brushing him away. Freedom tensed to fight but Shelly waved him down.

When the keypad didn’t respond to her codes the armored titan grabbed the edge of the door in her football-sized hands. The huge panels slid open with a groan of metal. Cold air washed out of the dark warehouse.

Over a hundred figures shuffled and turned towards the door. None of them blinked at the brilliant afternoon sun as it spilled over their dead eyes. They swayed for a brief moment and then the exes stumbled toward Cerberus.