G.I.Z.M.O. (COMPLETED)

Chapter XXXII

Current day, 06:35 AM, Mount Silver, Virginia.

            "Anyone home?" Cole shouted as he opened the front door of the small rental house on the outskirts of Mount Silver. He frowned in understanding...his question was entirely rhetorical. The man could clearly see there were no other vehicles in the rutted driveway of the tree encircled, several-acre yard. Regardless, Cole still hoped his family might have been here.

Cole had rented the two-bedroom, factory-built home and instructed Biltmore and Delinda to bring his family here after the op was over... no matter how things transpired. It was also their rendezvous location in the event the three of them lost communication with one another.

            "Where are you guys?" he wondered to himself, setting the backpack of documents down on the kitchen counter. He extracted the bag's contents onto the cracked white Formica countertop and quickly sorted through the pile.

"No phone...Shit! And I left my backpack of tools in the damn Prius along with that burner cell!" Cole muttered, angry with himself for being that sloppy. He surveyed the kitchen. "No phone on the wall either. How could I have been so absentminded?"

He exhaled and returned to foraging through the bag's contents. The digging stopped as Cole's hands landed on the cracked housing of the broken laptop. He lifted the SUV tracking computer and eyed it sadly. "It's not like you had any kind of internet connection anyways, genius..."

Cole wanted to fling the machine across the room, but stopped. He chose instead to calmly set the broken device aside, telling himself he could always pull the hard drive out of the thing and give it to Delinda to decrypt when she got there. It would give her something to do when he took off and did what needed to be done with that G.I.Z.M.O. weapon.

Thumbing through the paperwork, Cole nodded his head in slight satisfaction. Thankfully, the majority of the paper documents were intact and readable. Cole slowly sifted through the last of the paperwork until he located the file for Subject 42. Retrieving a chair from beneath its matching black and white café table, he laid the folder in front of him and sat down.

            "Top Secret: Project G.I.Z.M.O. Subject 42. Breed: Pekingese. Age: Seven months. Payload..."

            Cole poked a finger through a hole in the paper, wiggled it, and shook his head in frustration. "Dammit, you would know there would be a bullet hole..." Cole muttered, flipping the page back and forth to examine it. He knew what the payload was; nonetheless, he would have preferred to know how powerful the damn device in his kids' possession actually was...not that it would really matter if it went off. Cole shuddered and continued to read.

            "G.I.Z.M.O. – Government Issued Zoological Mobile Ordinance. Research Project G.I.Z.M.O. An attempt to gauge the efficacy of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) delivery systems utilizing zoological carriers. Radii's recent advances in nano-tech weaponry have made it possible to greatly reduce the size of WMD's. These amazing innovations, the capability to embed micro-ordinances inside of common household animals (note: pets), improve ease of transportability..."

            "Alright, that's all well and good, but how do you disable the damn thing?" He scanned over a few more pages and then stopped. "Damn."

Cole lay the paper down in front of him as the dull sound of an engine slowly filled the room.

            Cole raised an eyebrow, observing the shadow of a man's head pass by a window.

            "Chris?"

            "BOOM!" The kitchen door flew open followed by the pop and hiss of a CS "tear gas" canister rolling across the linoleum floor.