Second Nature

Chapter 6

A miracle, yes. Everything was miraculously fucked-up. Toshi possessed the highest level of security clearance. Only someone of his status could have pulled off such treason. 

Sweat soaked Eberhard's cotton surgical scrubs inside the biohazard suit; droplets snaked down his ribs. His mouth tasted like whiskey and sour stomach.  

He looked down at the other squalid peasants. He could manage conversational Spanish, but he no longer cared to interview the rest of the wetbacks. What was the point? The unthinkable had happened; that was all he needed to know from them, verbally. 

More critical information was forthcoming shortly. A group of suited-up lab workers in the outer vault worked at microscopes examining blood and tissue samples from the immigrants. The exams would reveal what Eberhard really wanted to discover: Had nanobots infected the Mexicans and the security personnel at Holloman? If so, he had better be right that the mitobots were harmless. He fought back rising bile. God, this was too damn scary. Had the plague already begun? Could this be the end of the whole fucking world?  

Gilberto turned his hat around and around in his hands. "Señor, what was, you know, what did we catch out there in the desert? Germs? Is all this about germ warfare?" 

Eberhard shook his head. "Not germs." 

"But...you wear that suit. They took our blood." 

"Just need to check on something." 

"We are going to die?" His bloodshot, panicked eyes stood out wide in his weather-beaten face. 

Eberhard detested this stupid serf-his dull, cloddish looks, his poverty and bad luck, his idiotic superstitions. "Go sit with the others, and shut up." 

Gilberto nodded anxiously and forced an apologetic smile. He got up and went to join the others gathered on the floor. Consuela unbuttoned the top of her dress and began nursing her black-haired baby. 

Eberhard glanced at a wall clock over the area where he'd tested Gen's recuperative powers. The minute hand crept ahead as slowly as an hour hand. Time was relative; Einstein got that right. Finally, he sat in Gen's chair to wait. 

The whole mess was incredibly sticky. Gen's very existence was supposed to be ultra-secret, so no local or federal law enforcement teams could be notified to help apprehend her. The jet fighters would force Toshi and Gen to land at a base where a military police force would be waiting. But Eberhard wasn't at all sure how a squad of MPs was going to corral Gen until a capture team could arrive with the proper equipment. It would take a steady blast of liquid nitrogen to freeze her in her tracks. She was virtually immune to any weapon less than a goddam Stinger missile-and besides, to attack her risked spreading the nanobots from her body, with possibly disastrous consequences. 

Eberhard strongly believed Gen's nanobots were benign, but he wasn't ready to gamble all life on Earth against his conviction. 

A voice came over the room's loudspeakers. "Colonel? We've finished running the tests." 

Eberhard spun toward the lab worker in the outer vault. Take your punishment standing; his dad had told him that many times before a beating. The colonel stood up, squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. "Go ahead." 

"Test results are negative." 

Eberhard gasped, opened his eyes. "Negative?" 

"Yes sir. No mitobots in their blood. Everything's normal." 

"The baby?" 

"Normal. Blood is clean."  

Eberhard sank into the chair. No plague! Gen's mitobots had not infected the other Mexicans. Even the baby must have passed any traces out of its body. His conclusions had been correct; the encounter in the desert confirmed his own, private lab trials: the mitobots were harmless. 

The god he had helped to create could safely walk among men! At least, it seemed that way. But the quicker he seized Gen, the better he'd feel. 

Eberhard dismissed the lab workers. They exited through the air lock. 

Gilberto stood, hesitantly. "No germs?" 

The colonel smiled paternally at the van's driver. "No germs." He popped the vacuum seal on his helmet and tugged it off. "See?" The odor of unwashed bodies smothered him like a serape tossed over his head. 

The Mexican crossed himself. "Gracias a Dios!" 

The others immigrants picked up the sense of the happy news and laughed and hugged each other. 

"Gilberto, thank you for reporting what you witnessed. Capt. Hughes thought you were loco-" 

"No, señor, I swear to you-" 

"Shhh." Eberhard held up a hand. "I believe you." 

Gilberto's brows knitted. "You believe this thing I see?" 

"I know what you saw. It was not the Virgin, my friend." He glanced around conspiratorially and drew closer. "It was one of them. You understand what I'm saying?" 

"One of them?" 

"Roswell," he whispered. "Area 51." 

The Mexicans eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped. "Ah, sí! Los extraterrestres. Ay yai yai!" 

"How many people have you told about this?" 

"Just you and Capt. Hughes. Not nobody else." 

"What about the helicopter crew that rescued you from the desert?" 

"No señor. I was, you know...I forgot all my English to hell. I talk only with the others, in Spanish."  

"Good," Eberhard said. "Listen, I'm going to bring back workers to set up portable bunks for everyone, so you all can sleep in here for the night." 

Gilberto smiled with broken teeth. "That is much kindness of you. We all want to sleep." 

Eberhard opened the airlock door and a whoosh of air gushed out of it into the glass vault. He stepped inside the airlock, helmet in hand. 

"What happen now to us, señor?" Gilberto said to his back. "We going to be took back to Mexico?"  

Eberhard turned. "You don't have to worry about that, my friend. Because of what you saw, the President of the United States herself is going to make all of you American citizens." 

"Is true?" Gilberto broke into a huge grin. "Muchas gracias!" He pressed forward, as if to shake the colonel's hand, but the airlock door was already spiraling shut. 

Eberhard laughed. In a moment, the far door spiraled open and he stepped out into the outer vault and entered Air Lock One. On the far side of Air Lock One, he underwent a five-minute decontamination shower, for show, if nothing else. Then he passed through Air Lock Two. It sucked open with a pop! onto the Staging Room, where he scooted out of his bio-hazard suit and scrubs and donned his Army uniform. 

Finally, he entered the main, lead-shielded lab room. He immediately crossed to a wall-mounted switch. The round, steel plate resembled the switches that activated the lab's emergency showers for washing off harmful chemicals; but the skull-and-crossbones emblem and the single word, X-RAYS, identified this switch as a killer, not a savior. 

Eberhard punched the switch with the flat of his palm. A klaxon started yelping like a frightened dog. Banks of capacitors under the aluminum floor of the isolation chamber discharged, firing a magnetized ball of superheated plasma up through a conducting column in the room's center to smash against a shield of depleted uranium at the ceiling, triggering a deadly monsoon of intense radiation. 

The men, women, and children hugging and congratulating each other in Gen's old quarters never saw the fire that baked them, for it made no flames. In the middle of a hearty laugh, a grateful cry, blood evaporated in the veins like water on a red-hot skillet. Cells coagulated. Flesh mummified.  

Three-inch thick lead plates muffled the chorus of screams that reached Eberhard in the main laboratory. Within seconds, the shrieking stopped.  

Eberhard ordered a crew to enter the isolation unit and dispose of the leathery remains in the lab's biowaste incinerator. He did not stay to oversee the clean-up, but hurried out of the lab into the paling desert night. 

By dawn, the colonel and his select team were aboard a C-141Starlifter, chasing at close to the speed of sound an escaped god.