The Stickmen (20 page)

Nothing happened.

“JESUS!” He pulled the gun back, fumbled
with its incomprehensible switches.
Where’s the fuckin’ safety
on this thing!
His fingers desperately pushed things until he
heard a click. Then he aimed again and fired.

The gun jumped in his hand as he squeezed
off three successive rounds. Then he ducked back behind the tree,
sputtering at the futility and the distance.

I might as well be shooting rubber bands
at the guy,
he realized.

««—»»

Sanders held his mark. Waiting was the
sniper’s ultimate discipline. Cheek to composite stock, he merely
waited, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He waited and
watched. Frankly, he was disappointed with himself: he’d already
missed with several shots.

That wasn’t like him.

But the target’s good luck was always the
sniper’s most exciting challenge.

Bright green leaves on low-hanging branches
obscured the target lane; this, however, was inconsequential to
him. He kept the scope’s thread-fine cross-hairs on the tree.
Eventually, he knew, Harlan Garrett’s head and a slice of his upper
body would appear to take some more feeble pistol shots up the
hill. The charcoal-grey suit jacket showed up well behind the
wreckage of the car and the background of green leaves.

Sanders took a full breath, then let half of
it out. This was how snipers breathed, in calculated, dead-slow
snatches.

Got him,
he thought.

As predicted, Garrett appeared again from
behind the tree. Before the man could even finish aiming his
pistol, Sanders had already depressed the rifle’s sear-pinned
trigger and sent a sodium-tipped .50-caliber round into the matrix
as a velocity of 2,700 feet per second.

Yeah, got him,
he thought again when
he saw Garrett’s head explode like a ripe melon in the
cross-hairs.

The sight was spectacular.

Garrett’s body fell to the ground behind the
tree.

Gun smoke hung as a vaporous wraith; the
aftermath was always eerily silent and scented with cordite.
Sanders liked the ethereal sensation. He stalked down the hill,
just along the inside of the wood line. His gloved hands gripped
the rifle at a loose order arms position. He took his time, so not
to make undo noise, stepping as quietly as possible over the
underbrush. Several minutes later, he made it to Ubel’s sedan,
which was punched full of holes. Luminescent-green antifreeze
dribbled from the crushed grill.

Letting Ubel get away was part of Sander’s
plan; given the circumstances of what was going to happen later
tonight, he shouldn’t be hard to find.

And the kid would be a cinch.

He stepped around the wrecked car, proceeded
toward the tree. Garrett’s decapitated body lay belly-down at the
foot of the tree…but already Sanders knew that something was
wrong.

Garrett was wearing a dark-gray suit jacket
and slacks.

Not khaki slacks,
Sander thought.

With the massive gun barrel, he poked at the
headless body and flipped it over onto its back.

Damn it…

When the jacket fell open, it clearly was
not Garrett’s body wearing it. Just above the gaping chest wound
Ubel’s black plastic nametag was all too plain.

Sanders knelt down, took some cover, and
scanned the perimeter with his binoculars. Harlan Garrett was
nowhere to be seen.

««—»»

Garrett’s ploy had worked, but he also knew
it was a false relief. He’d managed to run out of the other side of
the woods, and as luck would have it, his exit had brought him to a
post road, and more luck: he’d been able to hitch a ride back to
the main sector of the base.

He took some time to calm down from the
trauma of almost being killed, and then to wash up in the small,
hot wooden billet the Army had provided for him.

Get a grip, get a grip,
he kept
thinking, washing speckles of Ubel’s blood off his face before the
bathroom mirror. His hand shook as he combed his hair; his teeth
chattered in the aftermath of shock.

“I’m alive now,” he whispered to his
reflection, “but I won’t be for long if I don’t get my ass out of
here.” That much was for certain.

Men like Sanders didn’t simply give up when
they failed to “dispatch” an “assignment.” Garrett knew it wouldn’t
be long before the man known as QJ/WYN was back on the hunt.

He had no idea how much Sanders knew, so it
made the most sense to assume the worst.
Sanders probably has
access to the same information as me, probably more,
Garrett
woefully concluded.
He probably knows where I have to go, so he
could be waiting for me…

Garrett doubted that Sanders would miss if
he got a second chance.

He was just about to slip out the back of
the billet when the cell phone Myers had given him rang.

“That you, Lynn?” he asked.

Lynn’s voice sounded harried over the line.
“Harlan, something crazy happened here—”

“Did you talk to Jessica?”

“Yes, and—”

“Is she going to do the workup?”

“We’ve already done it, Harlan,
and-and-and—”

“Calm down,” Garrett said. “What’s going
on?”

A fuzzy pause, then Lynn said: “You’re not
going to believe this…”

Garrett sighed. “Believe me, Lynn, right now
my power of belief is
strong.
”

Another pause. “The…arm, Harlan…the forearm
bone—”

Garrett shrunk at the memory of Ubel’s last
words. Sanders’ bullet never gave the man a chance to finish his
explanation. “I know there’s something screwed up about it,” he
said. “A guy here at the post—one of Swenson’s men—told me that it
wasn’t really a bone. But I got no idea what he meant.”

“Well I
do
know what he meant,
Harlan. It’s not a bone, not anymore.”

What the hell did that mean? “Explain,”
Garret said, his patience quickly dwindling.

Lynn’s voice rushed in its obvious distress.
“Jessica tried to cut the bone with a surgical laser, and—”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was many minutes in which Jessica sat
beside the prep table in a numbed daze, her face flat and drained
in the impossibility of what she’d witnessed on her own autopsy
platform. If anything, she looked as though she’d been run over by
a truck and then propped up limply in the chair, to stare
incomprehensibly at the wall.

Lynn suffered a similar reaction but at
least maintained her jolted astonishment enough to actually stand
on her feet and talk into her cell phone.

Garrett was still on the line, and he still
didn’t fully fathom what she was trying to relate to him. Lynn, on
the other hand, couldn’t fathom
how
she would relate it to
him without sounding completely and utterly insane.

“What, Lynn?” Garrett insisted over the
line. “What’s the problem?”

Lynn unconsciously pressed the phone to her
ear to the point of discomfort. “The arm, Harlan—the forearm bone.
It…regenerated.”

“What?” Garrett barked.

“It regenerated, and it’s—shit, I don’t know
how to say this…”

`”Just say it!”

“It regenerated, and it’s still alive.”

The following pause was so long that Lynn
feared the connection may have terminated. “Harlan?” she asked.
“Harlan, are you there?”

Eventually his familiar voice returned.
“What are you talking about? It was a bone recovered from a crash
site. It was
charred black
by fire. Lynn, it
can’t
still be
alive!
It’s been a dead, dried up bone since
19-fucking-62, and it’s been wrapped up in a plastic bag since
then! Any cellular material that might have remained on the forearm
after the crash was burned off by the fire! “

Lynn understood Garrett’s inability to fully
perceive the situation. Nevertheless, out of her
own
self-doubt, she glanced back over to the autopsy table to take one
more look at the “post subject.”

In only the handful of minutes since Jessica
had tried to cut it with the laser, the “bone” had not only grown
skin and a veil of underlying muscle fiber, it had since then
fattened with more flesh. Tendons and muscle fibers had grown
considerably more prominent beneath the shiny, pale-pink skin.

“Did you hear me, Lynn?” Garrett continued
to prod over the line. “It
can’t
still be
alive!
”

When he’d said this, Lynn was looking
squarely at the bizarre multi-jointed two-fingered hand which
extended from the wrist.

The fingers were clenching, extending,
freely opening and closing right there on the exam table.

“Yes, Harlan,” she told him. “Yes, it
can…”

««—��»

Regenerated.
Still alive.

Impossible,
was Garrett’s first
reaction, but then that was the
basic
reaction, the expected
one. A reaction born of the same linear-thinking, methodized,
objectified, and utterly demythologized modern society that Garrett
often felt he
existed
to rebel against. His life’s work was
focused, in fact, on the exact
opposite
 of the social
machinery that spurred him to reject Lynn’s claims as “impossible.”
Garrett believed for the life of him a great many things that most
people would condemn as impossible, and he’d seen impossible
things.

Nothing’s impossible,
he remembered
after a few self-reflecting moments. He couldn’t let himself fall
into the same sensibility that blinded the world.
Just because I
don’t understand something…that doesn’t mean it can’t be.

There was no reason for Lynn to lie, was
there? And Garrett
knew
her, had loved her and lived with
her and been married to her. The distress—the sheer and total
astonishment—in her voice had been real. Garrett didn’t doubt it
for one second.

Something happened at the morgue that I
don’t understand.
He calmed himself with the open logic which
now forged all of his most passionate endeavors. He believed most
fervently that science could explain everything, but he also
believed that there were many aspects of science that he and rest
of humanity could not yet comprehend and that some of those
aspects, in spite of the magnitude of the human mind’s complexity,
would simply
never
be understood.

That
was what Garrett believed.
That
was the creed by which he lived, and
that
was
the reason he’d rejected so many “normal” opportunities to instead
live like a pauper and be laughed at, ridiculed, and stripped of
all credibility by nearly everyone he ever met.

Dead bones didn’t come back to life—but dead
alien
bones?

That was all Garrett needed to get his act
back in gear. In the senseless minutes that had just ticked by,
everything made sense again.

He chain-smoked, squinting at the base’s
black and white street signs as full-dark descended into the sky.
A fuckin’ map might be a little help,
he complained to
himself. He hadn’t realized the Edgewood Arsenal was so vast, with
so many different quadrants. There were administrative areas,
maintenance areas, training and supply areas—all which existed to
support the post’s one and only function: to properly and securely
store weapons and explosives that the Army needed to keep in its
inventory. Right now, however, Garrett slowly cruised this sleek,
shiny Buick through the base’s residential section.

Jesus, this place is like a rat’s
maze,
he thought, and flicked another butt out the window.

The base phone book, of course, had been of
no use: anyone with a high-grade security clearance on this base
wouldn’t be listed; in some cases, even their
names
were
classified. So when he’d left the visitor’s billets, and changing
from his blood-speckled shirt to a clean one, Garrett had driven
straight to the post’s personnel office and, after having
identified himself as Special Agent Richard Odenton, had been given
the domiciliary address of Warrant Officer Kenneth Ubel, whose
undiscovered body, Garrett knew, remained off in the woods still
wearing Garrett’s fine Joseph Abboud Ltd. suit jacket. “I just need
to talk to him real quick about a classified matter,” Garrett had
explained, badge and ID wallet in hand. “Major Shaw at the ASA
office knows about it. Feel free to call him for verification.” The
sergeant at the duty desk hadn’t bothered, and had quickly given
Garrett exactly what he needed: Ubel’s barracks address.

Area November,
he remembered what
Ubel had told him.
Depot 12.
Ubel’s heart had been blown out
before he’d had time to relate the actual directions, but Garrett
also remembered what else he’d been told: “I’ve got the directions
and the lock combinations stashed back at my barracks…”

The term “barracks,” though, in the modern
Armed Forces, had stuck in spite of its antiquation. Garrett
pictured 1950’s-type Quonset huts, from which G.I.s would rush at
morning roll call to trample into formation. What he found instead
were rows of buildings that more resembled clean, modest
condos—officers’ quarters. Garrett
wished
his own place was
so nice.

It’s gotta be around here somewhere,
he reasoned, still squinting. He’d found the right road but still
had to idle down to the right building. For a moment, he stopped on
the dark, paved road, pulled out the piece of scrap paper on which
he’d scribbled down Ubel’s address: General Maxwell Taylor Avenue,
Building 4128, Unit 313.

There it is!
Garrett rejoiced,
slowing up at the three-story building marked 4128. He pulled over
to the curb and got out of the car.

It’s in there somewhere,
he thought,
meaning the directions to the crucial location Ubel had referenced.
He gazed up at the sedate apartment building identical to every
other building along the street.
Area November, Depot
12.