Bone Rider (18 page)

“The troops are clean. Some of them are a little banged up, but we’re talking scrapes, bruises, and a cracked rib or two. That all happened when they more or less fell down a slope during the retreat, from what they told us. Not a single alien-induced cut on the lot of them.”

“You sure?” Young asked, skeptical. “Could they be lying?”

Weston shook his head and downed his coffee in two long gulps. His teeth were stained yellow, which made Young think that the good doctor either drank way too much coffee or should definitely stop smoking. “Of course, but we checked them head to toe. No cuts. Just scrapes. No cuts hiding in the scrapes, from what we could tell. No foreign matter found except for dirt, native pollen, and clothing fibers. For the most part, they’re all healthy as horses. We’ve been checking for any kind of anomaly, but the only thing we found was half a dozen coins in one of the privates’ small intestine. Turns out he swallowed them on a bet.”

Young grinned behind his own cup, but didn’t comment. “Could something be hiding in their bodies?”

“Well, we x-rayed them, did MRIs, full body scans, took blood and tissue samples…. We don’t have all the results back yet, but I doubt it.” Weston was eying the donuts now. He was on his third shift and obviously hungry, but the plate was on the general’s side of the table and though this was an informal conversation, Young’s four stars formed an invisible barrier between them. “You want my professional opinion, sir?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Young reminded him mildly, and pushed the donuts across the line.

Weston nodded his thanks and took a huge bite. He chewed and swallowed quickly, obviously used to eating fast. “There wasn’t enough contact or proximity between these men and whatever attacked them to transmit diseases. The ones who got that close got killed, and considering all those diced-up, perforated bodies in the morgue, I’m thinking probably not by biochemical agents.” He licked a smear of chocolate off his thumb. “They are clean, too, by the way. Dead, but clean. Not a single trace of alien matter, not even in the wounds.”

Young preferred to keep the bodies out of it for the moment.

“So if I wanted to talk to the men…?”

“I’d say go ahead, but since we don’t have all the lab results yet, they’re still quarantined. I recommend you use the interview room, just in case. Security glass and intercom. Safest method, if you ask me.”

“Set it up,” Young ordered, emptied his own cup of coffee, and left to make some arrangements himself. He wanted to be able to take off at a moment’s notice as soon as they had a confirmation of the alien’s current whereabouts. Somehow he suspected nobody had thought to put the necessary personnel on standby yet. Turned out he was right.

He took care of it and then checked in with his aide to get an updated sit rep. The lockdown of the I-10 had been lifted, press releases prepared and sent off, the necessary confidentiality agreements had been signed by everybody involved, and Young’s staff was proving its worth once again by keeping civilian authorities and the rest of the alphabet soup at bay. The reports from the crash site, on the other hand, were disheartening. What little had remained of the ship was still disintegrating. All attempts to secure samples had failed because the substance that was destroying the alien vessel also dissolved every single container they’d used for collecting the material and, up close, the vapors were eating through the air filters. The only upside was that there were no towns or groundwater deposits anywhere nearby, and the soil contamination was minimal. In short, the only thing they were learning from the wreck was that these aliens knew how to build a kick-ass self-destruct mechanism.

Back to square one: autopsies and witness interviews.

T
HERE
was one thing about General Nick Young a lot of people figured out too late in dealing with him, and that was that he was good at extracting information. He’d attended several advanced training courses on interrogation and interviewing techniques out of interest and because nobody anticipated a brawny giant of a man to use psychology instead of blunt force. Kind of like people not expecting him to be fluent in Russian and Arabic, even though he’d served in Spec Ops for most of his life and foreign language skills were mandatory in his field. He didn’t mind the prejudice. It fucked with people’s minds and Young enjoyed that considerably. An additional bonus was that the tricks he’d picked up were also remarkably helpful when dealing with politicians.

The soldiers had all been debriefed before. Since then they’d been poked and prodded, pricked with more needles than any sane being would think acceptable, and kept in quarantine quarters that weren’t exactly designed to put a man’s mind at ease. They were exhausted, irritable, and scared shitless. It required skill and patience to tease out new facets of what they’d already said over and over again without having them tip into POW mode and clam up. He started with the ones who were worst off so they’d be able to get some rest sooner. It was long past midnight by the time he finally got to talk to Captain Mark Brennan.

Young liked Brennan. The captain was a sturdy man in his mid-forties, solid in a way that went beyond the physical, but he was pale now and probably well on the way to developing PTSD, like most of his men; haunted by the ghosts of the fallen still, because it was too early for him to have properly dealt with the loss and the survivor’s guilt. Brennan had been stationed abroad several times but hadn’t seen combat until he’d gone up against those aliens. Talk about a baptism of fire.

Even after what he’d been through though, Brennan was in decent shape and had kept his satisfyingly analytical mind. His initial report had been methodical if concise and he didn’t hesitate to elaborate and include personal observations when Young asked for them. He was in the middle of describing the armor, how the aliens had moved, how they had killed, when suddenly he trailed off and stared into space for a moment.

“It’s the psycho one, isn’t it?” he asked. He looked up at Young, a hazy terror growing in his eyes. “The one we killed last. Thought we killed last.”

Young leaned back, assessing him. “What makes you say that?”

“It was different.” Brennan rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, the memories clearly making him uneasy. “I saw it… it tore apart my sergeant. Harris. Bill Harris. After the ship blew up. It just—it went nuts. Completely psycho. Hacked him to pieces and didn’t—didn’t stop. We shot it with the Spitfire, like the others, but it… I thought….” He took a breath, searched for words, but eventually merely slumped a little and repeated, “The explosion looked different.”

Jackpot.

“Different how?” Young asked, careful to keep his voice level, his body language relaxed, and his limbs well out of Brennan’s personal space bubble. Just two soldiers, exchanging information. No need to get stressed.

Judging from how carefully Brennan considered this, scrunching his eyebrows in concentration, he honestly hadn’t thought about it before. “It was louder. Brighter. Seemed like it, anyway. When I thought about it later. I mean, the crater was still burning and we were all distracted, but… there was more of an explosion, I think.”

“So you believe it’s that specific alien that survived?”

Young didn’t like it, but couldn’t honestly say he was shocked. It figured they’d get to tangle with the crazed one.

“I don’t know, sir,” Brennan hedged, though the shadow in his gaze said he was pretty fucking convinced, “but the explosion was different.”

They held
, Dr. Butler had said.
They died and their hosts died, but they kept it together
.

The eggheads still didn’t know whether the creatures were naturally evolved organisms or manufactured defense systems, but maybe it didn’t matter. They had been destroyed while protecting their hosts, but what if, Young wondered, what if this one being had a stronger instinct of self-preservation or simply was smarter than the others? What if it had sacrificed its host in order to survive? It would explain the poor condition of the empty body in comparison to the other two. It also made the thing more likely to jump hosts when cornered instead of making a stand. A critter that knew when to run was much more dangerous than a preprogrammed killer on a rampage. It would be harder to find, harder to nail down and kill. It would try to go underground and do whatever it had been created to do, which could be anything from living out its days in peace to engineering the annihilation of mankind.

Unfortunately, Young’s talk with Paul Riordan only confirmed his suspicions about how well the alien could blend in. Riordan was thoroughly freaked out and had absolutely no idea what was going on. The exhaustive medical exams hadn’t helped ease his mind, though they’d definitely eased everybody else’s. No sign of tampering. Except for the fact that the man had apparently popped caffeine pills like candy, which wasn’t unusual for a trucker, Riordan was as hale and healthy as your average fifty-four-year-old professional truck driver.

Riordan himself believed he’d been exposed to some kind of toxin or radiation, an impression reinforced by the thick glass wall between him and Young. He’d had a major freak-out shortly after they’d brought him in, but seemed mostly composed now, though clearly confused as to why Young kept asking about an already half-forgotten late-night encounter in the middle of nowhere.

“I don’t know who he was,” he repeated, unnecessarily slowly as though not sure they were speaking the same language. “I barely talked to him. Is that what this is all about? Who was he? Some kind of terrorist?”

Young raised an eyebrow. “Did he look like a terrorist?”

“I don’t know!” Riordan jumped up and started to pace. Young watched him, but kept silent, knowing the repetitive movement might help Riordan think, remember. It certainly was going to make him feel a bit more in control, and that was all right. He wanted Riordan to cooperate, wanted him focused, not scared to death. Riordan glanced at him, noticed the expectant look, and ran a shaky hand across his scruffy face. “He looked like an average Joe,” he offered, a little calmer. “White guy. Tallish. Five o’clock shadow. Fit. Southern accent.”

Young nodded encouragingly. “Old? Young?”

Riordan grimaced. “I don’t know. Honestly. It was dark. Mid-thirties, maybe?”

“Did you notice anything in particular about him, anything at all? Something out of the ordinary. A scar, maybe. A special belt buckle or piece of jewelry. Did he say anything strange?”

“I don’t
know
.” Riordan threw up his hands, frustrated. “No. Nothing. He seemed like a nice guy. Polite. A little befuddled, maybe. Didn’t know why he’d fainted. He thought it was probably low blood sugar, but he seemed fine. I wouldn’t have left if he hadn’t.”

“Do you remember his face? Would you recognize him again?”

Young knew the answer before Riordan even opened his mouth. The sheepish expression said it all. It had been dark. Riordan had been tired and hadn’t paid attention. Like most civilians, he wasn’t trained to observe and memorize details. The one man who’d seen the host’s face was your typical unreliable witness. Young resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“What about his car? Can you tell me something about his car?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of truck. An older model, I think. Hey, do you think I could get a cup of coffee?”

This wasn’t going to work.

I
T
WAS
an irritated, headachy General Young who went into the conference room in the wee hours of the morning to report to his Commander in Chief via a secure line to the White House. The president looked almost as tired as the rest of them, but he was alert and listened to Young with an unhappy frown.

“You think termination’s the only way?” he asked when the general had finished his analysis.

There was an undertone in his voice that tripped all of Young’s alarms—the backstabber ones. He’d spent enough time swimming in the murky, shark-infested waters of Washington politics to know the scent of unsolicited interference. As annoying as it was, though, there were dance steps to be performed before you could get to the heart of a matter, rules to be followed, and one of them stated that you couldn’t tell the president of the United States something about his questions smelled fishy. Young didn’t know the enemy yet, so all he could do was stick to his guns and wait for the reveal.

“Yes, sir,” he said, meeting the dark eyes of his superior with unwavering conviction.

The president glanced down, looking at something on his desk, then back up at Young. “Killing is a rather permanent solution.” It wasn’t a “no” yet, but it sure as shit wasn’t the go-ahead Young had expected. “We make a wrong move here, we might end up regretting it for a long time to come.”

“We don’t make a move, sir, we might end up losing a lot more than two dozen American soldiers and a civilian with bad timing,” Young reminded him coolly.

“We know how to kill it.”

“No, sir, we know how we killed the other creatures,” Young countered, a hint of sharpness in his tone. “The entity we’re talking about was hit with the same type of missile and is apparently alive and well.”

“And yet you believe you can destroy it,” the president said mildly.

Young shrugged. “Doubling the firepower usually does the trick. It hasn’t had much time to adjust or evolve yet.”

“I read the updated autopsy reports, General.”

Young’s jaw clenched. Butler. Had to be. He should’ve known the woman was going to cause trouble. Independent thinkers usually did. As a rule, Young considered the ability and readiness to take initiative a plus, but when it got him hit by friendly fire? Not so much. He shouldn’t have left her out of his sight. She must’ve sent this new version of her report while he’d been interviewing the survivors, and apparently she’d changed her mind about how to proceed. Hadn’t come to him, because… well, probably because she’d known he wasn’t about to risk his men’s lives so she’d have something to study and write papers about.