Second Nature

Chapter 61

Other than that, the two men were to do nothing. They didn't even carry weapons. They were not here as soldiers, but only delivery boys. 

Colburn felt weird without his M-16A4 rifle. Naked. Like standing around at a frat party without a beer in your hand. His eyes watched the roadway and the view of the box. 

He shuddered. Not because the package looked so threatening, but because it looked so harmless. To be going to so much trouble to kill-to nuke-a young woman really freaked him bad. Like his Creole grandmomma would say, "She mus' be da devil hisself!" 

Frost clothed the woman's nude figure. In white patches it mottled her dusky skin, like pale lichens growing over smooth, dark rock. Frost and ice clung to her rippling locks, turning them into wavy icicles that sparkled like party glitter. Frozen eyelashes zipped her eyelids shut. 

Spooky thing was, Popsicle Girl was a total babe. Off the chart on the Ten-Scale-like maybe a Perfect Twelve. But all she had to do was sneeze, or cough up some evil shit and it could wipe out everybody on the planet.  

Damn sure couldn't be anthrax. Everybody had gotten a shot against that bug-one of those elective inoculation programs the brass insisted you "volunteer" for. 

Had to be something gross and nasty. Like Ebola. No, worse. A lot worse. They were going to nuke her, for chrissake. 

Probably some bioweapon hybrid where they mixed Ebola with AIDS with clap with friggin' Congo monkey-ass flu, or something crazy. One little exposure-say, just kissing a beautiful girl like her-and your belly bursts open like a piñata and your guts pop out like colored streamers. 

Today's Army: vaporizing girls to save the world. 

His superiors had told Colburn next to nothing during the mission briefing. She was highly infectious and blah, blah, they had said. An unstoppable plague.  

But how much had they left out? 

He stared at the restraints forged of tempered steel that locked down the girl's wrists and ankles, plus more steel restraints across her thighs and torso. What's up with that? She some kind of-what? Supergirl? 

Despite the muggy, Louisiana-bayou heat inside his suit, a chill slithered up Colburn's spine like an icy snake. He shuddered again. 

You just keep frozen, babe. Just stay chilled out. 

Outside the windshield, Colburn watched a pathetic little rain cloud trying to rain, but the raindrops evaporated before they hit the sand. The desert air wrung out the cloud like a threadbare rag and-poof-it was gone. 

A half-hour later, Colburn had decided that after this duty he needed to find himself a more effective deodorant. The one he'd used that morning had lost its ability to mask the odor of his sweat. The atmosphere in his suit reeked like a locker room after the big game. Exactly-Lysol smell and all. Even a hint of urinals-that detail provided by the suit-contained plastic bag he'd just peed into. 

Thanks to Eberhard's anal distress about mission safety, the Humvee was not to exceed thirty miles an hour. Hell, I've been in parades faster than this, Colburn thought. He was a man of action, not the kind of guy who took well to sitting on his butt for long periods, delivering hard-frozen girls to nuclear bomb sites. He wished he could take off his sweltering gear, jump out of the truck, knock off his daily six-mile run, and then hop back in. He would sweat less jogging in the desert sun, than trapped in his own personal swamp while coolant drizzled down to pool in his boots. 

He checked the package in the monitor again. The girl looked like a mannequin carved from frozen molasses. Supposedly, she was alive, but he did not know how that was possible. He hadn't seen her breathe once. The top left of the monitor screen gave an EEG readout, monitoring her brain function. Amber waves danced up and down rhythmically, so...yeah, somebody was home.