Obsidian

Chapter Three

The air in the Midwest town held more humidity than I was used to after all the years in Southern Colorado. Every step I took felt like I walked through an enclosed sauna that you would find at a gym. I had been on-site for three days at this point, since being thrown into the whirlwind situation presented by Dr. Wendall Stone. After that final Friday class, I had shot off an email to my superiors stating I had a family emergency and would be back in a week or two. Following that email, I composed another one to my students, stating that I had uploaded a syllabus for required reading and video links to study and to explain they would be seeing a substitute in the interim while I attended to my family matters.

I advised my team, which consisted of Amy Brooks and Carl Friedman, they may want to draw up the same emails and meet me at the airport in the morning. Amy and Carl had started as my students and over the last four years had become my assistant research team members. The team had also consisted of Julia Rodriguez and Jason Hauser before they had branched off last semester to pursue their own endeavors. Jason's girlfriend has gotten pregnant and he decided it would be more responsible to get a lab technician job with Johnson & Johnson, instead of chasing pipe dreams in the forests of Vancouver or studying viral eels in the Rio Coco of the Caribbean. Julia Rodriguez chose to serve her country and join the Marines before the age deadline of twenty-eight years old that she had been rapidly approaching. I couldn't blame either of them for their choices.

I ended up at the Denver International Airport that next morning at the requested time. Amy had already been on the tarmac speaking with someone from Henkrikson Pharmaceuticals. Amy was a very intelligent woman and I knew how lucky I had been to have her on my team. As I approached, she was scratching at her nose and while inaudible, I saw by her body language that it was a safe assumption she was giving her signature chuckle, which she was always embarrassed by. No more than five-foot-two, her creamy complexion of Asian descent was glowing as the lights on the plane and surrounding setup bounced off of her. Being as book-smart as they come, she was a rather socially awkward young woman. She was a bit frumpy, which I don't think would have hindered her chances of getting hit on if she were out at a bar. Her hair was mildly out of date though. In a subconscious decision, she somehow chose a hair-do like Velma from Scooby-Doo, which was currently running wild from the early morning breeze.

I had approached the table in front of a tent, set up just outside the Beechcraft King Air 200 with the Henrikson Pharmaceuticals wrap plastered across it. Stone was right to recommend being there early, as signing the NDAs alone took almost twenty minutes. It was only that short because I didn't read every line either. If I had, it could have easily taken another hour. Thankfully, Carl showed up no more than five minutes after I arrived. Carl looked like the offspring of a nerdy Dungeons & Dragons player and a surfer. He was overweight and normally looked slobbish in his demeanor. This morning he was surprisingly in an outfit that matched and even had close-toed shoes on. His normally wild, stringy, strawberry-blonde hair which made me want to call him Phillip Seymour Hoffman, had been not only combed but pulled back in a ponytail.

Following the required signatures, we all endured an ocular check, ear swab, cheek swab, blood pressure test, and two vials each of blood drawn for what I assumed was standardized testing against markers for disease. None of the precautionary measures seemed to add up. Stone was treating us like we were going to infect something on the site and not the other way around. It wasn't until we landed and immediately went to the base that Henrikson Pharmaceuticals had set up on the border of Oakridge and LPC, that we realized the bill of goods Stone presented was no more than a simplistic, if not borderline untruthful, lie to get us to accept the job.

Upon arrival, my team and I were escorted militarily by Stone to one of the tents on the far side of the sectioned-off woodlands. We were briefly introduced to the two site purveyor foremen, the Henrikson Pharmaceuticals lawyer, or at least one of the many I assumed Conrad Henrikson kept on retainer, and even a handful of crewmen appointed to the search teams. By the time I was settled in that first afternoon, there had only been a few hours of daylight left. Normally, when surveying and excavating sites, at least in my prior knowledge of working with or investigating wealthier companies, they would spend the extra money and bring in night crews to work around the clock. The fact this was not the case, irritatingly scratched at my curiosity.