Authors: David Brookover
The NNC operations and intelligence center was nestled deep beneath the surface in an abandoned top secret missile silo, which was located on a government real estate parcel codenamed Bobcat Run in Southern Ohio. The tract retained its secure military zone status in the center of Wayne National Forest, outside Marietta. The long-forgotten silo was closed down and disarmed in the mid-1990s with little fanfare in the small community.
Rance Osborne, the former FBI
Orion Sector
Director and current FBI Director, called in some congressional favors so Uncle Sam would foot the enormous bill for modernizing and equipping the thirty-year-old white elephant with the most advanced electronics. Also included in the generous contract was a stipulation that gave Crow Smith of NNC full ownership of the FBI’s powerful supercomputer,
Geronimo
.
Geronimo
was Crow’s baby. Crow’s idea for designing
Orion Sector’s
supercomputer sprouted from a simple napkin sketch many years ago. Once Rance secured the necessary funding, the genius Omaha Indian created the sassy, cantankerous super-computer. Thus, NNC’s CIC, Computer Intelligence Center, had been born.
They named their new state-of-the-art facility
Old Mother Hubbard’s
, a nursery rhyme codename.
Shortly after Nick, Neo and Crow initially saved the United States president’s life several years ago, first-term President Sheldon Hanover ordered the Department of Defense to award NNC a ninety-nine-year government lease on the
Old Mother Hubbard’s
facility for a mere dollar. After the lease period elapsed, the silo automatically reverted to NNC’s absolute ownership without further remuneration. NNC was finally in business for the long term.
After reestablishing his human persona, Nick returned the rental and teleported to his Mustang convertible in the long-term parking lot at the Port Columbus International Airport in Columbus, Ohio. An hour later, he entered the shaded Bobcat Run gloom. He guided the Mustang along a nameless gravel road, opened the electrified security gates with his secure remote control, and followed the concrete drive into a colossal, three-story hilltop red barn. The structure was actually a hundred yards from NNC’s
Old Mother Hubbard’s
underground facility.
There were no tractors or farm implements inside the barn’s interior—only NNC company vehicles and advanced electronic surveillance equipment. NNC built the barn far from the entrance to the old missile silo to discourage foreign and domestic spy satellites from discovering the exact location of the
Old Mother Hubbard’s
. Only the forest of satellite dishes inhabiting the barn’s tin roof and three adjacent faux grain silos distinguished NNC’s rural buildings from those of the surrounding farms.
Nick insisted there be major structural modifications before the barn was raised. He specified the inclusion of bulletproof barn siding and windows, a tunnel connecting the barn and missile silo, and a dozen computer-operated 50 mm machine guns strategically positioned in the barn eaves behind movable panels.
The barn’s entrance doors automatically closed together behind him as he parked the Mustang in his reserved spot. He grabbed an electronic identification transmitter from a locked cupboard and lugged the heavy cage containing the Oracle president to a customized dune buggy with an armored body and a bulletproof glass windshield. After he secured his seatbelt, a hidden panel slid aside, revealing a dimly lit tunnel and a pair of glistening tracks. He barely had time to brace himself for the ride before the dune buggy rocketed along the tracks through the soundproof tunnel.
At the midway point, an electronic scanner automatically interfaced with the vehicle’s identification transmitter. If the dune buggy attempted to pass the checkpoint without an approved transmitter on board, the scanner would detonate explosive charges hidden within the walls. The unauthorized intruder would be instantly vaporized.
Nick stopped the eccentric dune buggy at the entry to the U-turn at the end of the tunnel and carted the bulky cage up the stairs. He entered a modest, heavily armored building, cleverly disguised as a rustic deer hunter’s cabin. Upon exiting the ersatz cabin, a stiff, warm breeze tousled his hair.
He trudged another seventy feet to an arched, faded green concrete buttress that sheltered an alcove and its reinforced steel door. The shallow, reinforced structure was built into a forested hillside overlooking the barn and silos. Nick pressed on a wall pressure point, and a hidden green panel slid sideways. He warily surveyed the area for spies before inputting the security code that unlocked the entrance to
Old Mother Hubbard’s
. The floor descended ten feet like an open-air elevator to the first level of the armor-plated concrete complex. After typing in the elevator access code, he stepped inside and rode it down into the bowels of the silo. The car finally decelerated to a smooth stop, and Nick rushed past the opening door and marched down the brightly lit labyrinth of institutionally wallpapered corridors.
Nick sighed happily. He was home at last.
Now came the brain-drain task of solving a puzzling series of exasperating, but critical investigative issues.
Who orchestrated the communications breakdown between Oracle studios and Terror Island? Who sicced the assassins on Natalie, Gabriella, and himself? What was that amber fluid in Maggie Wentworth’s syringe that transformed her into a nasty tempered lizard-insect monster? And where did the wicker fungus originate that changed Natalie into a homicidal maniac?
Nick’s appearance signaled the start of another stressful, ball-buster day.
The mermen charged the boulders, deserting the females, who continued to feast.
Noah glanced back over his shoulder and was amazed by the mermen’s graceless movements. The creatures used their five-digit hominoid arms and hands as forelegs and their tails to flip them forward. Although ungainly, they were fleeter than he anticipated. Urgency bordering on panic drove his legs forward at a faster clip than before he checked on the mermen’s progress. Dragging his dazed partner after him depleted his energy at an alarming pace. The two of them slipped and slid deeper into the boulder forest, banging and bruising their shins and kneecaps, but they couldn’t slow down and take it easy. The mermen were steadily gaining on them.
The frequency of lightning bursts waned, and the thunderclaps grew more distant as the storm crawled out to sea. The blinding downpour was reduced to a light sprinkle. Shrill insect choruses and unfamiliar fluttering sprang up along the plant-covered mountainside as if someone had flicked a switch, but the mermen’s breathless grunts trumped all the other sounds. Noah slipped for the umpteenth time and suppressed an expletive. Blood seeped from jagged cuts in their legs, and their bruises screamed for rest, but rest meant death tonight. They had to avoid the mermen at any cost.
Noah frowned bleakly. The pesky storm’s exit created one major difficulty.
Lack of light.
He and Reese plunged headlong into a dark maze of irregular silhouettes. Since the lightning show was calling it a night, they couldn’t distinguish a boulder from an enemy animal or plant. Their senses were reduced to touch, and then it may be too late. They might stride into a monster’s yawning mouth and not recognize the danger until it snapped its enormous jaws shut on them. Of course, on the bright side, that would eliminate the relentless mermen problem.
Noah’s intuition urged him to draw his knife, and his insight was right on target. The knife barely cleared the sheath before a merman’s panting breath rustled the hairs on the back of his legs.
“Keep going!” he yelled to Reese. When she slowed to ask
why
he wasn’t coming with her, he shoved her ahead while a pair of clawed fingers gripped his calves. He fell forward into Reese’s backside, which cushioned his falling head.
He twisted around the instant the merman inched his two hundred pound frame up Noah’s legs so it could rip away its prey’s chest. He lay stone still until the repulsive bastard climbed within striking distance, and then he carved a trench in the merman’s scaly throat. Blood spewed from the fatal wound like a fountain and soaked them both. Noah glanced up and saw three of its companions galloping over the slippery rocks toward them.
Noah slithered out from beneath his dead attacker and buried his knife blade in the closest merman’s eye. The thrashing creature shrieked bloody murder, which stopped its two companions dead in their tracks. Noah retreated between the two lofty boulders where he last saw Reese. A soft hand gently grabbed his wrist and startled him. He raised his knife hand to stab his new attacker, but another daylight lightning web illuminated Reese’s concerned mien. He lowered his bloody weapon.
“Why’re you still hanging around here?” he demanded angrily. “I might’ve killed you if it wasn’t for the lightning.”
Reese tugged him forward. “See
why
for yourself,” she said quietly.
A cold shiver coursed through Reese’s fingertips and up his arm.
“I’m not going to like your surprise, am I?” Noah posed as he glanced quickly over his shoulder at the merman corpse. Thankfully, its companions had vamoosed.
“I certainly
hope
you don’t like it! If you do, you’re really sick and twisted,” she berated him.
Reese led him through dozens of boulders before suddenly halting. She waited for the next lightning flash to expose her chilling discovery. There was an ungodly interval between lightning flashes just when they needed some damned light! The suspense was killing Noah.
What gruesome sight was he about to see?
The storm finally cooperated.
A yellowish white blaze streaked across the horizon and lit up the island. Noah recoiled at the ghastly scene in front of them. His stomach flip-flopped, spurting a geyser of red-hot bile into his throat. Noah utilized every ounce of willpower to force the hot and sour emulsion back down.
“Did you see them?” Reese asked breathlessly.
“Yeah, and I’m sorry I did. Obviously, we won’t have to look for the four Stout Hearts anymore.”
Blood from their broken bodies dyed the nearby rock piles and boulders, but the storm’s cloudburst washed a lot of the splattered guts into the crevices. Noah was thankful for that. But his heart was heavy nonetheless. Stumbling across their corpses dealt a serious blow to their hopes of escaping the island alive.
Reese sobbed softly. “Now what do we do? They’re dead, and we’re next!”
Noah brushed back a tear of his own, but the stench of the rotting corpses produced
his
tear. “C’mon, be a little more positive. We’re not dead yet, Reese. I think we ought to stick to our original plan and circle the island to the docked boat. We’ll get your antibiotics there.”
“I hate this place!” she bristled. “We’ll never make it to the cove!”
He couldn’t help but agree after all the dangers they witnessed so far. He doubled his sore hand into an angry fist and searched for something to punch, but the only punchable objects were rocks. He lightly kicked a rock instead.
Noah and Reese moved on, avoiding the gruesome remains the best they could, but the corpses fouled a wide swath of beach. This was one time he was glad for the darkness.
The roiling clouds chased the storm out to sea, exposing a wan half-moon that softened the shoreline shadows. But Noah and Reese still cringed when they came upon black puddles that could likely conceal lurking enemies.
“This island’s reality is
way
too real for me,” Reese muttered as she weakly hooked Noah’s arm.
Wanting to avoid ambushes at all costs, he clutched his knife and searched the darkness in front of them. He suddenly perked up, as if still digesting Reese’s glum comment.
“This place is way too real for me, too,” he remarked quietly. “We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
So far, all they had witnessed was the worst of it.
Nick dropped off his cargo in NNC detention room #2 and tramped down the hall through a pair of heavy steel doors. He entered the security code to gain entrance to his company’s operational hub.
Crow Smith stood in the center of the cavernous, plushly appointed central command and control facility conversing with his lovely wife, Jill, when Nick marched in.
“Hey, Custer, welcome back to the reservation,” Crow hailed him with a broad grin. Half-moon craters spread on either side of his typically grim mouth as he gave his closest friend a bear hug.
“It’s nice to be back,” Nick said warmly as he backed out of their embrace.
Jill shot him a sparkling smile and pecked his cheek before excusing herself to check on their two-year-old son upstairs. Uncle Neo was currently performing babysitting duty. “I don’t want to wear Neo out so he’s useless to your investigation,” she joked.
Jill Sandlin Smith was the daughter of the Good Samaritan, Joe Sandlin, who had rescued Nick from Hollis Danforth’s sacrificial altar and driven the boy to California all those years ago. She was in her early thirties, and her short, stylish light brown hair framed her apple face. She had a slender figure, perky breasts and shapely legs. While attending Northwestern University on a tennis scholarship, Jill tore her MCL. That injury ended her college tennis days.
When Jill closed the door behind her, Nick frowned. “I checked out the detention rooms and didn’t find the Oracle assassin Gabriella brought here for Neo to interrogate.”
Crow’s visage darkened. “That’s because the chicken shit bastard committed hara-kiri. After Gabriella left him in detention room #3, he opened a large pill bottle and sicced some nasty looking beetle onto himself. It burrowed into his body and turned the guy’s skin to sticky goo inside five minutes.” Crow hesitated while he mentally chased his queasiness away. “Neo and I stowed what was left of your assassin in a sealed jar, and the beetle in another.
Geronimo
is performing an autopsy on the guy in the examination room and a DNA probe on the beetle. So far
Geronimo
hasn’t had much luck identifying the dead beetle. It appears to be a chimera.”
“A what?”
Crow rolled his eyes as if everyone was familiar with a chimera. “It’s a living being biologically created from the DNA of different species. In other words, the bug that killed the assassin isn’t a
natural
inhabitant of Earth. It’s manmade, so to speak.”
“Genetically engineered,” Nick murmured before slapping a fist into his other palm. “That beetle sounds like the same kind of bug that killed Natalie’s shooter before Gabriella could nab him.” He paused pensively. “If you think your beetle’s the cat’s ass, wait until you see what’s in the cage in detention room #2. It’s Oracle’s president, Maggie Wentworth!”
Crow drifted to his control station, which rivaled NASA’s Mission Control Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for its complexity, and flicked one of the dozens of purposely unmarked toggle switches. Crow insisted they remain unidentified so no intruder could glance at them and learn how to seize control of
Old Mother Hubbard’s
and
Geronimo
. The switch activated the camera in detention room #2. The Indian’s dark forehead wrinkled as his keen black eyes studied the occupant of the metal cage.
“Holy tribal displacement! That lizard mutant is really
Margaret Wentworth
?!” he exclaimed.
“You bet! Interesting, huh?”
“I’ll say.”
Nick fished the wrapped syringe from his pocket and handed it to his friend for analysis. “Wentworth injected this amber fluid into her thigh, and presto, she became the hostile creature in the cage. There’s a residual quantity of that chemical inside the syringe for
Geronimo
to analyze.”
Nick watched as the short, stocky computer genius mulled over the extraordinary development. Crow’s slight paunch protruded over his Omaha Indian belt buckle, and his long black hair was braided into two plaits. But the computer guru defied the typical nerd stereotype. The thirty-six-year old’s knotted biceps and street fighting prowess were anything but nerdy. His lone eccentricity was he despised his birth name—
Running Bear
. So when he turned twenty-one, he legally changed it to
Crow Smith
.
“This Wright investigation is getting weirder and weirder,” Crow mentioned. He placed the syringe and its contents inside a padded metal box, closed and locked the lid, and slid it into a vacuum transport compartment. In the blink of an eye, the box vanished to a loud whoosh and was deposited at one of
Geronimo’s
testing stations.
“You want weird, I’ve got
really
weird.” Nick filled him in on the so-called attacking Wicker bullet and its effect on Natalie.
Crow clucked his tongue. “Sounds like we’re up against a bunch of bio-terrorists.”
“Tell me about it,” Nick agreed. “Have you seen Gabriella?”
“Yeah. She’s upstairs in your apartment, taking a long, hot bath. She gave us all strict orders not to disturb her unless you were in mortal danger.”
Nick forced a slight grin. “I feel some mortal danger coming on,” he kidded.
“Whoa! You’ll have to put your mortal danger stunt on hold,” Crow said. “Our old boss is waiting impatiently as usual for the three of us to join him in the conference room. And the worst part? He brought some bureaucrat with him.”
“Rance Osborne is here?”
“In the flesh.”
Nick groaned. “What does the old man want with us now? I’ve got two cousins to locate, and he should know my family takes precedence over his FBI investigations. After all, he preached that ideology for years.”
“Don’t I know it, but I’ll let
you
remind him. Me and Neo are clamming up,” Crow maintained.
“How nice.” Nick watched the Wentworth creature in detention room #2, but it seemed content to lay still. He swung his gaze back to Crow. “So you don’t have any idea who Rance brought along?”
Crow shrugged. “I’m afraid not.”
Nick slung his arm around the shorter man’s shoulders. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”
Reluctantly, they exited the central command and control facility and slowly made their way to the conference room downstairs. Neither one was eager to meet their nameless visitor.