J.M. Dillard - War of Worlds: The Resurrection (31 page)

Ironhorse pushed it at him. "Don't be stupid. There might still be some of them down here."

"No," Harrison said more firmly, and walked ahead of him. Ironhorse shrugged and grasped the rifle in both hands, following.

The grass gave way to dirt near the barn. The colonel apparently saw something; he moved quickly to the entrance and crouched down in the sand.

"What is it?" Harrison followed as quickly as he could.

"Gordie," Ironhorse whispered, then said aloud, "Sergeant Reynolds. His body was here . . . now it's gone."

"What?" Harrison blinked down at the tangled mass of cable by Ironhorse, then peered uneasily into the barn. All was quiet darkness.

Ironhorse picked up the alien weapon and studied it, then dropped it to one side. There was a deep red, congealed spot on the ground; still sitting on his heels, the colonel reached with one hand, not quite brushing his fingers over the spot where Reynolds had fallen.

"Gordie ..." he said, without looking at Harrison. "Damn them." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Damn them to hell."

Harrison stood back quietly, feeling a tug of sympathy for the man. Beneath the tough-guy exterior, there was a real human being .. . and as horrible as it was for Harrison to lose Suzanne, how much worse must the loss of so many men be for the colonel?

Ironhorse crouched silently with his back to Harrison for a while, then raised his head and said, "And over there ... look at that." He pointed to two blackish, evil-looking masses near the barn entrance. "One of those was the man Reynolds shot, and one of those was the ATV rider who tried to waste me." He looked questioningly at Harrison. "What the hell
is
this?"

"I don't know," Harrison answered honestly.

"Unbelievable." Ironhorse shook his head, then rose. "I'll check out the barn. Think you're up for the house?"

"Sure." Harrison wasn't really, but he left the colonel where he was and walked over to the old farmhouse. The front door had been kicked off its hinges and lay in the middle of the doorway, half in, half out. Harrison stepped over it gingerly. In the front room, the walls were charred; plaster lay scut tered on the floor, and the wooden ceiling beams hung down in long, thin shreds. A faint trace of gas remained, stinging his eyes and making them tear. He circled around the first floor through the kitchen and dining room, until he arrived back at the entrance, near the staircase. "Suzanne?" he called out timidly.

There were signs of struggle everywhere, but, amazingly enough, no bodies. Harrison climbed the rickety stairs with some trepidation; in one of the second-floor bedrooms he found purplish stains spattered across a wall, and realized it must be alien blood ... but excitement faded quickly to disappointment. There was no way to get a sample; all his instruments were smashed, useless up on the hillside. "Suzanne?" he called again, this time louder as desperation began to take hold of him.

There was no denying it—she really was gone. He stumbled down the stairs, through the front doorway, and out into the brightening daylight. He stood on the front porch and leaned heavily against one of the remaining posts. Let the damn house collapse on him—he didn't care.

He remembered his words to her and shuddered.
Dr. McCuIlough, if you get yourself killed, I will never forgive you.
Fat lot of good that had done. He thought about the things he had forced himself to ignore while she was still alive, like how beautiful she was. As lovely as Charlotte. No, dammit, even prettier because, unlike Char, Suzanne seemed totally unaware of her good looks. Okay, so maybe she'd been an uptight person, but she had her priorities straight.

Once she was convinced the alien threat was real, she'd been a trooper, hadn't complained once about the trips, about the danger ... had even insisted on coming when she knew the risk involved.

And, in some crazy way, he felt, he had been able to get over Charlotte so easily because he had hoped that somehow, Suzanne and he ...

He didn't even let himself finish the thought. Wouldn't have worked anyway. No two people were less alike. He rested his forehead against the post, ignoring the ominous creak, and didn't look up when Ironhorse walked up and said, "Nothing. You?"

Harrison shook his head.
"Damn
it," he whispered, swallowing hard to keep back tears. He wouldn't cry here, now, especially not in front of the poker-faced colonel. "I shouldn't have let her talk me into bringing her along."

To his surprise, Ironhorse's tone was sympathetic. "It wasn't your fault, Blackwood."

"Then
whose
was it?" Harrison jerked his head up angrily. "All right, so she was the most uptight person I've ever met—but at least she believed me! Where else am I going to find someone like ... her?"

A violent sneeze coming from underneath the porch caused the worn wooden planks under Harrison's feet to shudder. He dashed off the porch and stood next to Ironhorse, who raised his rifle as the grate under the porch began to move, then fell forward onto the grass. Suzanne, her face smudged and dirty, peered out.

"It's me! For God's sake, don't shoot!"

Ironhorse grinned and lowered the gun. He and Harrison knelt down as Suzanne struggled from the

crawl space on her stomach; they both helped her to her feet. She was filthy, her jacket and khakis covered with dirt and cobwebs, but to Harrison she looked absolutely gorgeous.

He was grinning so hard his cheeks hurt; impulsively, he grabbed her and squeezed her tightly, not giving a damn anymore what the colonel thought. She responded gratefully, hugging back with enthusiasm at first, but then something caused her to stiffen in his embrace. She wormed free. "I'll have you know that I am
not
uptight!" she said indignantly, brushing at the spiderwebs in her straight, dark brown hair. "I am a pro/mional!"

He laughed at the realization she had been honestly insulted by his remark. Still giddy with relief, he said, "A professional who doesn't know how to take orders. You were supposed to stay hidden back in the forest, remember? I spent one hell of a night looking for you."

She bristled a little at that. "You neglected to tell me that those things—aliens—were going to be crawling all over. By the time I slipped away and worked my way down here, you and the colonel were doing your off-road routine." She pointed at the crawl space. "This seemed like a good place to wait things out. You think
you
spent a hell of a night. I was down there trying to negotiate with the rats and the snakes! And it was
freezing
last night—I'm still shivering." She rubbed her arms in an effort to warm herself, and craned her neck to peer anxiously around. "The aliens—where are they?"

"Hard to say now," Ironhorse replied, stooping to
297

retrieve one of the makeshift weapons from the ground. "From their tracks, I'd say they split up in a dozen directions." He held the weapon up, letting it dangle. "This is some weird stuff we're dealing with here. A bola made from what looks like baling wire and old gears. I saw a stripped-down old tractor behind the barn." He looked over at Harrison. "The truck was parked in the bam, all right; there are tire tracks in there that came from an eighteen-wheeler, along with more empty barrels—-I counted thirty-six. Truck's gone now, and they must have taken the unopened barrels with them."

Harrison closed his eyes and turned away, sickened. He had hoped to stop them while there were only a handful free, before they'd had a chance to release any of the others.

"If they made these, they must be pretty intelligent," Ironhorse continued. "But the weirdest thing about all this are the terrorists who don't act like terrorists . . . who don't
die
like terrorists. At first I thought that maybe there were human beings behind all this. Then I thought maybe some strange cooperation between humans and aliens. But now . .."

Harrison turned back to look at him. "Whatever they were, Colonel, they weren't human."

"Agreed." Ironhorse shook his head as if unable to believe what he had seen. "If I tell my superiors, they'll give me a Section Eight so fast my head would spin. But I know what I saw. A body dissolved after I shot it—the same way it happened with the guy Reynolds shot just before he was killed."

"I saw it too," Harrison told him grimly.

"So did I." Suzanne nodded thoughtfully, omv again in scientist mode. "I've been thinking about that. Did you notice how clumsily they moved, almost as if. .." She faltered, then continued. "As if they weren't used to their own bodies?" She glanced at Ironhorse. "Maybe you'll think / qualify for a Section Eight after this, but it seemed to me that the aliens were
controlling
those bodies, the way one would a puppet. Either mentally, or, more likely, from within."

Harrison gaped at her, astounded. "You mean an alien
inside
a human body? Come on, Suzanne, we both know that's impossible!"

"Is it?" she responded coolly, arching a delicate brow at him. "Where's your much-touted imagination, Dr. Blackwood?"

Ironhorse seemed interested. "Shut up and listen," he told Harrison. "She's got a point. When that guy dissolved, it seemed he had something black inside-something that didn't belong. Hell, you've got the remains of three of them around here ... all you need to do is take a look." He turned to Suzanne. "But they dissolved .. . just like something out of a grade-B horror flick,"

She nodded. "This is all pure conjecture, but maybe, in order to exit the human body, the alien secretes a strong acid. It would destroy the host, of course."

"And the alien, too, if it was hurt or couldn't make it out in time," Ironhorse finished, stroking his chin.

Harrison frowned. "Like you say, Suzanne, it's all pure conjecture. But at least we've got the concrete proof Uncle General Wilson wanted. If we can just figure out a way to transport some of those bodies with us."

Ironhorse removed his jacket. "You can use this," he said as Suzanne grimaced and Harrison looked uncertain. The colonel shrugged. "But whatever we do, let's do it fast before they come back."

Within a matter of hours they were face-to-face with General Wilson in a borrowed office at Vanden-berg Air Force Base. Wilson stood contemplating the sunny fall morning beyond the window, one loosely clenched hand resting against the small of his back, the other holding the bowl of his pipe.

Seated behind him were his niece and Harrison, who slumped wearily in the straight-back wooden chair and tried to ignore his throbbing back, aggravated by the hours spent sitting in the helicopter and then waiting to see Wilson.

Suzanne looked far better than Harrison felt. She sat upright in the chair, hands folded in her lap, and her damn-the-torpedoes expression combined with the determined tilt of her chin gave Harrison comfort. Clearly, she and the general were made of the same stem stuff. During the past few days, Harrison reflected, she'd given more like three hundred percent than a hundred fifty. He shot her an encouraging look. She saw, but was too focused on what Wilson was saying to acknowledge.

Her uncle was still staring out the window. "What you're telling me, then," he said in response to Suzanne's extended monologue, "is that you failed to get the sort of hard evidence I asked for."

Harrison and Suzanne gasped simultaneously, but she got the first word in. "Failed to get
proof?"
Her voice was shrill, indignant. "For God's sake, I just showed you my figures on the radiation levels at Jericho Valley—"

"Theory," Wilson countered without looking at her.

"What about the partially dissolved body we recovered?" Harrison retorted, impatient that Wilson seemed to be playing some sort of game with them. "How much more concrete can we get?"

Wilson sighed. "There wasn't much left. .. hardly identifiable. I'll take your word that it's what you say it is, but, frankly, anyone could dissolve tissues with acid and claim they're alien remains."

Harrison watched with interest as a bright red flush spread across Suzanne's cheeks, the bridge of her nose. Her brows flew together. "Surely you're not suggesting that we
tampered— "

"I'm not suggesting any such thing, Suzanne." He turned his head to regard her from the corner of his eye. "I'm telling you the kinds of things my superiors will say to me."

Harrison came to their defense.
"Three
eyewitnesses, General," he said emphatically. "And one of them an army colonel. What more do you need?"

"Lieutenant colonel, actually," Wilson corrected him, turning his short, stocky body toward them. "And as yet he hasn't officially backed your story."

"That son of a—" Harrison muttered darkly. Wilson ignored him and walked over to the small government-issue desk to empty the contents of his pipe into a glass ashtray, then refill it with fresh tobacco.

"So." Suzanne sat, a coiled spring, hands clutching the armrests, knees and ankles together, posture unnaturally stiff. "Our word—mine and Harrison's— counts for nothing, then?"

Wilson looked up from the ashtray and gestured apologetically with the pipe. "I didn't say that, Suzanne. But it
is
hearsay."

"Hearsay!" Harrison blurted. Exhaustion magnified his frustration, and he began to rise from his chair until Suzanne reached out with a restraining arm. He sank back with a sickening sensation of defeat. "How can you call it that?"