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Chapter 53 – Desert FlowerAlex went silvery, dived down into one of the dry creeks, and took one of her favorite storm drains home. She puddled up the driveway, where her dad was digging a tiny trench right along the edge of the lawn where it touched the driveway. He pretended not to look at her as she went past him. She puddled under the front door, cracked it a couple inches, and yelled, “Hey, Dad, Mom needs you in the kitchen!”
Then she dragged her mom out of the laundry room to the kitchen and made both of them sit down. She stood there, still in her Terawatt uniform, and said, “I just got a call. That whole Desert Research Institute thing I told you about? Graham Miller’s down there, and he just called in a Code Red. I’m going to shower and eat and pack my gym bag and fly back to Camp Atron. Jack has a jet coming in, in a couple hours. I’ll probably be back in a couple days, if everything goes okay.”
Her dad said, “Well, that’ll give me time to get my new surprise ready for you.”
“What is it?” she asked.
He just smiled. “It’s a surprise.”
She rolled her eyes and flew upstairs to shower. And she ran her uniform through the laundry as quick as she could. She ate a big lunch while she did, and she dumped another box of those protein bars into her gym bag. The peanut butter ones and the blueberry ones her mom got that she ate a bunch of in Europe were pretty tasty, and the new box was chocolate mint, which sounded pretty yummy. She had the wig all combed out and her gym bag packed way before her suit was dry. She even took the time to slip two presents into her bag for Jack to take back to the West Virginia base.
And she had a padded ‘case’ her mom had sewn for her. It was made so she could slip her tablet computer into it, and it had little sewn-on pockets on the front for the charger and the earjack. There was even enough room in the earjack pocket for the earjack’s little charger, too, because her mom had measured everything. And the padding would probably keep the tablet all safe if stuff got bounced around.
Once her suit was dried, she put it on, hugged both her folks bye, grabbed her gym bag, and flew off to Camp Atron the usual way, with puddling down the driveway to the storm drain, then flying silvery through the pipes to her favorite dry creek, then zooming across the city as a silvery blob. It was easier if she made herself thinner in the direction she was flying, so she was trying to hold her shape pretty much like Nemo in “Finding Nemo”. It also made her a heck of a lot harder to see from the ground, and that was a bonus even if she was maybe five or six hundred feet up.
She flew way above the sentries at the gate and went straight to the tarmac. She saw the little Cessna come tearing in and then landing fast before taxiing pretty quick over toward a big refueling truck. She headed for the truck. She landed while a couple of guys hurried through getting the jet hooked up to the tanker truck, and Jack got out of the jet to glare at them behind his aviator glasses. He did look awfully cool like that, in a really sexy bomber jacket and khakis. No wonder he swept Willow off her feet.
Okay, Alex still wasn’t sure how much sweeping was being done by who, because the way Willow talked, it sounded like Willow was doing the sexy, slutty thing while Jack was trying to do the ‘wholesome older man’ thing. Because, really? Crotchless panties? Holy crud, Alex could’ve gone her whole life without knowing Willow had a pair of see-through crotchless panties and used them to make Jack too horny to think straight. And Jack was old. Just thinking about old person sex made her feel yucky. She didn’t even like to think about the pretty obvious thing that her parents had sex a long time ago. At least twice. Guck.
She landed in front of Jack and gave him a big smile. “A trip to sunny Arizona? Are you sure you don’t want to be taking your girlfriend down there instead?”
He grimaced. “She’s not getting within a hundred miles of anything dangerous, if I have anything to say about it. And this sounds really dangerous.”
She asked, “A hundred cows? Really?”
He said, “More. In one night. And the sheriff seems about as sharp as a bowling ball.”
Alex had to bite her teeth together not to giggle. Willow said not to encourage Jack. Even if Willow giggled around him like all the time.
He gave her a smirk and said, “You might wanna check who I brought along this time.”
Alex gave him a suspicious look, and flew into the jet. There were three people. She only recognized two. She didn’t know the balding guy with the glasses.
Jack stepped in right behind her and said, “Terawatt, the stiff guy at the back is Professor Bill Lee. He’s one of our interdisciplinary scientists, and his specialties are in biomed and biophysics. He’s along to help us get to the bottom of whatever this Deemer whacko is up to.”
Professor Lee complained, “Gerald Deemer is not a ‘whacko’, colonel. He’s a respected scientist with decades of accomplishments.”
Alex figured that with Professor Lee around, she was going to have to be Terawatt all the time. No wonder Jack asked her to fly in wearing her uniform.
Jack went on, “This is ‘Clear’.” It was Grover.
Alex said in her Terawatt voice, “It’s good to see you again. How is your mother doing?”
Grover was in a lightweight white cotton hoodie. Alex hoped it wouldn’t be too hot to wear when they were in Arizona. He said, “She’s doing fine. Cindy’s keeping her … out of trouble.”
Jack added, “And this is Action Girl.”
It was Hanna, naturally. Hanna was wearing what looked like expertly-tailored desert-colored camouflage military clothes, down to a pair of sand-colored combat boots.
Alex smiled. “It’s good to see you up and around. I am assuming the colonel picked your codename?”
Hanna calmly said, “It is only a codename. If I do not like it, I will ask for another on the next mission.”
Alex said, “We’ll talk later.” Because there was no way she was letting Jack stick Hanna with a goofy codename Hanna wouldn’t like.
Jack said, “Let’s get buckled in and get a move on. It’s less than six hundred miles to Luke Air Force Base, and I want to get moving before Finn and Lupo beat us there.”
Alex hopped into an empty seat, and the jet got going in its usual ‘Jack is in a huge hurry’ fashion. She thought Professor Lee gulped a few times as the jet took off and rocketed up toward its preferred flying altitude.
Jack explained what they knew so far. Graham had been stonewalled by Sheriff Codger — Alex still didn’t know what the sheriff’s name really was — but had found out there was a dead body that the sheriff had gotten the town doctor, one Matthew Hastings, M.D., to look at. The sheriff had the corpse squirreled away somewhere, so Graham couldn’t get a look at it, which sounded pretty suspicious. Since the lab fire at the Desert Research Institute, Dr. Deemer acquired a new assistant, a woman named Stephanie Clayton, who was spending all her spare time dating Dr. Hastings. The Desert Research Institute was supposed to be studying hardiness characteristics in desert animals, and how that connected to their genetics. Walsh had published some papers on that from her work at the place, including a few papers on gene therapy using coherent introns from unrelated species, whatever that really meant. And Graham had found a suspicious string of incidents: power lines and phone lines going down with no storms, missing people, lost horses and cattle, crashed vehicles, and an entire house destroyed. But Sheriff Codger was intent on shutting Graham down, for no reason.
Jack added, “So maybe Sheriff Codger is involved in this up to his eyebrows, or maybe he’s fed up with Feds and doesn’t like people snooping around on his turf. Or maybe he just enjoys being a complete dick.” Grover laughed out loud.
Well, that wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Professor Bill Lee, who kept telling Jack not to call him ‘Billy’, explained that Dr. Gerald Deemer had a long history of research into ‘environmental concern’ areas. New species of wheat and rice that could be hardier or need less water. Studies of desert and high-altitude species to see what made them so durable. Studies to see if food animals could be made to grow faster, or to grow at a normal rate on less food. Alex thought the guy sounded way too wholesome and responsible to be working with Maggie Walsh.
Okay, Professor Bill explained it all in a lot more words with a lot more syllables, but Grover kept interrupting and saying more stuff that was what Alex wanted to hear so she could understand what was going on.
Alex really wanted to sit with Hanna and Grover and just chat, but with Professor Baldy back there, Alex couldn’t just be Alex. And she really didn’t like that Jack was hauling Grover and Hanna into what could be something messy. Even if Jack was hauling her into something that could be messy, and she was younger than Grover. But Selina said her boyfriend Batman had a teenaged ‘sidekick’ and they went and fought crime and supervillains pretty much every night. Ugh.
When they landed at Luke Air Force Base — Alex thought that was a weird name for a base until Jack explained it was the last name of a famous World War I pilot, not some guy who was named Luke Something — there was a good-sized helicopter waiting for them. Riley was sitting up front with the pilot, and Jo was in the back opening the door for them. Jack pointed at the thing and said, “It’s a Super Huey!”
She wondered if that was a ‘superhero’ joke, but Jack assured her it was a Bell UH-1Y Venom, which pretty much everyone called a Super Huey as it was built as an upgrade to the old Bell Hueys. She figured it was still a superhero joke. Jack wouldn’t be able to resist getting a ‘super’ chopper for a superpowers investigation project.
It was really hot out on the tarmac. She went silvery to handle the heat better, and she flew over to the copter. The copter was hot, too, but then the whole place was hot. It was Arizona in the summer. Ugh. Paradise Valley could get hot during the summer, but not like this. And when it was hot at home, you just drove west to the ocean or east to the mountains or north to the Bay Area. Here, you were in the middle of a ginormous desert.
There was room for about ten people in the back part of the copter, so it wasn’t crowded. Even if no one wanted to sit right next to Professor Lee. They closed the doors, and Jack said into the Super Huey’s comm system, “Let’s get this show on the road, Finn.”
They took off and headed pretty much southwest, into what Alex figured was the middle of nowhere. Jo showed her and Hanna a map of Arizona, so they could see where the little town of Desert Rock was. It and the institute were smack in the middle of nowhere. If bad stuff was happening out there, nobody was going to notice. That was probably a bad thing.
The whole place looked pretty desolate. If the copter crashed, Alex could fly off for help, and Hanna could probably hike her way out, but everyone else would be in big trouble. It was just thousands and thousands of square miles of pretty much nothing, with an occasional town or cattle ranch or something stuck out in the middle of nowhere. She could see why it might be a great research area for something called the Desert Research Institute, but who else would want to live out here?
They landed the copter about a hundred yards from a fenced area that didn’t have any live cows in it. There were low hills and ridges all over the area, and the hills and ridges were just stark rock, not even nice grassy hills you’d want to climb up and then have a picnic on. There were three cars there already. A police car, and a regular car, and a military car that looked like the Army owned it. Alex figured that was Graham’s car. She hoped it had air conditioning. Graham was standing there arguing with a sheriff-looking guy and a couple who were being pretty cozy considering they were next to a giant animal slaughter.
She flew over and did her superheroine pose a yard above the ground. “Captain Graham Miller, I presume?”
He acted like he didn’t know her personally. “Terawatt! Boy, am I glad to see you.”
The sheriff drawled, “So, Army Boy, you got superheroes pullin’ your fat outta the fire these days?”
Graham gave him a look like he’d been having to put up with this guy’s garbage for days. Come to think of it, he probably had. He said, “No sheriff, I called her to pull your fat out of the fire. This is not anything normal, and you know it. But you keep acting like if you hide everything long enough, I’ll leave and it will all blow over. It won’t. It will just get worse and worse, until it’s too late to call for help.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Phone lines are down again. And no cell phone reception out this way. So I guess I’m not callin’ for help right now. You neither.”
Graham said, “That’s why I have a satellite phone. And I have all the help I need.”
“A hot babe with big hooters in a funny outfit? Even if she can fly, I don’t see a big help there.”
Boy, she was not liking this guy. Alex gave him her best Terawatt voice. “Even if you don’t see the advantages of a superheroine, I do. And I think you need my help.”
“Our help,” Jack smirked as he strolled up. “Sheriff Codger? I’m Jack O’Neill. We talked on the phone a while ago. Maybe you shoulda been straight with me, so your people wouldn’t be losing their livelihoods now. And their lives.”
“That’s Sheriff Jack Andrews, sonny.”
Jack just gave him that annoying grin of his and said, “That’s odd. Everyone I asked about you said your name was ‘Ole Codger’.”
Graham said, “Sir? I think we need to step in. I just now stopped this idiot from sticking his fingers in a pool of unknown liquid and tasting the stuff.”
The guy who obviously thought he was really handsome and had the pretty brunette woman right next to him, said, “Hey, I know what I’m doing. I’m a qualified M.D.” He gave Alex a smile and said, “Doctor Matt Hastings. And this is Steve Clayton.”
Alex gave him a stern look and said, “Excuse me doctor, but I have more experience with extranormal events than anyone on Earth, and I can tell you right now that sticking your fingers into something of an extranormal origin is never a good idea.”
The sheriff said, “He’s done it before, he’ll probably do it again.”
Graham rolled his eyes. Alex asked, “And where would this be?”
Hastings said, “We’ve had a string of animal deaths and human deaths all over this area. Every one of ’em had the flesh melted right off the bones, and puddles of this stuff nearby.”
“And you stuck your fingers in it?” she gasped in astonishment. Was this guy a moron? “If a substance capable of melting mammal flesh is being wielded out here, and you stuck your fingers into a puddle, you’re just lucky you didn’t lose your hand. And your tongue.”
‘Steve’ looked horrified, but the doctor smugly said, “It clearly didn’t do anything to me.”
Alex said, “This time.”
Jack smiled at the brunette and asked, “Aren’t you Dr. Deemer’s new lab assistant?”
“Why, yes, I am,” she said.
He asked, “Pretty sweet job. What’s he working on? More desert adaptability studies?”
She said, “He’s concerned about world population growth and food stores in poor countries. He’s trying to develop a serum that would let people grow food faster. I think it’s a wonderful goal.”
Alex thought it sounded pretty great, too. And ‘Steve’ really believed in it. Or else she was the world’s greatest actress.
Grover and Professor Lee walked over. The professor said, “We have samples of the liquid, and some scrapings of something that was on the bones. The closest useful lab is Doctor Deemer’s. Could we get a ride out there?”
Matt Hastings said, “Sure! I was just going to drive Steve back out there. I can give you two a ride.”
Jack said, “Sheriff, you wanna show us on a map where you’ve got these freaky skeletons cropping up?”
The sheriff said, “Look Mister Fed, I don’t like it when those Air Force pricks run their exercises and tell me what I can’t do, and I don’t like it when the state troopers tell me they’re takin’ over some investigation, and I sure as hell don’t like it when some smartass who I don’t even have to listen to starts tellin’ me what to do!”
Jack snapped, “But you do like having dead ranchers and dead truck drivers and dead cattle herds and dead horse herds?”
“Where’d you hear about that?” the sheriff asked.
Jack gave him a smirk. “You can lie your ass off to Captain Miller, but that doesn’t mean he can’t figure out what’s going on without your help. Even if you’re hiding dead bodies from him.”
“Just one corpse, sir,” Graham said. “He’s got it locked away where I can’t get to it without committing B&E, and he’s had a deputy keeping an eye on me in hopes that I’d try it so he can lock me up.”
The sheriff even smirked at Graham. What a jerkhead.
Alex flew to directly in front of the sheriff. “Excuse me, but if you just cooperate with us, we can determine if this is even an SRI situation. If it isn’t, then we’ll get out of your hair.”
“What he has left,” Jack stuck in.
“And if it is an SRI situation, you’ll be very glad you let us in. The last SRI situation, because we were not called in early enough, ended up with about twenty murders across Europe and northern Africa. The one before that? Three murders, several attempted murders, and I just barely arrived in time to stop twenty deaths in a super-powered bank robbery.”
The sheriff winced a little. “I may’ve heard something about that one.”
She said, “Let us do our job, and we’ll let you do your job.”
Jack added, “And you can get back to spending your time matching your neckerchiefs to your cowboy boots and your belt buckles.”
Sheriff Andrews pointed at Jack and said to Alex, “I don’t like him.”
Alex said, “I suspect the feeling’s mutual. But you can work with me instead, if you’d rather. All I need is a map.”
The colonel acted grumpy about her pulling the investigation out from under him, but gave her a local map that had GPS coordinates for a grid that was laid over it. She knew that was exactly what Jack wanted, he was just manipulating Sheriff Codger. The map had roads on it, and the town of Desert Rock, which was really more of a wide spot than a town, and the ‘Desert Research Institute’ which was also where Dr. Deemer lived. It didn’t really have what Willow called ‘topographic features’ on it, meaning all the hills and rises and dips and giant rocky things that made up the landscape around the area.
The sheriff grumbled, but she gave him a big smile. And he sort of automatically smiled back, even if he sort of looked at her chest, too. But he did what she wanted. He took Jack’s map and marked down places where they had animal skeletons from three ranches, one of which had a dead rancher as well. He also marked down the crashed truck and the human bones.
Alex thanked him and gave him a smile, but she was feeling kind of freaked inside. Because the ‘incidents’ were pretty much centered around a spot not that far north of the Desert Research Institute.
Jack took a look at the map, gave her a ‘nicely done, Tera’ wink and started delegating duties. “Clear and Bill, go with the doc and ‘Steve’. I can’t believe these guys haven’t noticed that she’s not a ‘Steve’. Maybe they’ve all got sunstroke. Miller and Lupo? Go with the sheriff and check out that body, then get a deputy to loan you a car or drive you out to the institute. I want to know why he’s so damn determined not to let anyone know about that body. And take a sat phone so you can call me if you need to. Miller? I’m taking your car. Tera and I are going to go check these two points on the map, while Finn and Action Girl take the chopper and check out these others. Oh, and Finn?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Do a flyby on your way back through the center of these points, and tell me if you spot anything from the chopper.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Everyone meet back at the institute. I want to see everyone there in two hours max, sooner if you can manage.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack grinned. “Okay, everybody, break on two!” And he clapped his hands, like he was running a football huddle.
Graham tossed Jack a set of car keys, which Jack snatched out of the air one-handed. Then Jack tilted his head toward the car, and Alex flew after him.
Once he was in the car and he had the air conditioning running, he said, “Nice work on Sheriff Codger there.”
She said, “It’s not hard playing good cop after you’ve spent a couple minutes playing annoying cop.”
Jack said, “That guy’s suppressing evidence just because he doesn’t like the state troopers and the feds, so he doesn’t want to deal with us. He has no idea what may be going on.”
She said, “Jack, we don’t either.”
He said, “Well, yeah, but we know something’s going on. Now let’s peel out. I want to look at the truck first.”
She just asked, “I’m gonna be stuck being Terawatt all the time, aren’t I?”
He nodded sharply. “Yep. Except at bedtime. I got us rooms at the local dump, I mean hotel, in the town. The doc’s office is on the ground floor! This isn’t a one-horse town, it’s about half a pony! Anyway, you and Hanna and Jo are sharing a room, if we have to stay in town overnight. Two of you will have to share a bed. Sorry. Us four boys are gonna be doing guard duty, four hours each, so someone sleeps on the floor in a sleeping bag while two of us get beds and one’s watching out for everyone else. Although Lupo’s probably gonna complain if I don’t let her have a watch, too. I’ll send our flyboy and his copter back to Luke AFB overnight, just to keep it safe and out of the hands of whoever’s running amok here. I may still send most of you back with him, just for the night. I really have a bad feeling about this. One cow, eviscerated or ripped apart I could see. A hundred of ’em, skeletonized? That’s not one supervillain. I just don’t know what the hell it is.”
Alex said, “I … I got nothing. I can see some bad connections, but from Walsh however long ago that was, to something happening now? I don’t get it. And people keep saying Dr. Deemer’s one of the good guys.”
Jack drove and said, “Everyone I asked said Deemer’s probably gonna win himself a Nobel Peace Prize one of these days. His work on cultivars of rice might save thousands, maybe millions, of lives in Asia. My guess is he wanted Wacky Maggie because of what she could do with DNA, and she wanted to come out here for a metric buttload of money. But what was she doing for him?”
They tossed around increasingly crazy ideas, until they got to the crash site. Jack pointed to the truck, and Alex flew over. The truck was on its side, and pretty crushed. The driver’s side door was on top, and it wasn’t closed all the way, like someone scrambled out while the truck was knocked over, and just left the door like that. And there were little police evidence markers all over the place about eighty feet from the truck’s door. All the markers said stuff like ‘skull’ and ‘ribcage’ and ‘foot bones’. Ugh. But the ground was hard. And there was no blood. At all. How could anyone rip a person apart without blood?
She flew up about twenty feet and looked around. The ground was too hard and too dry to leave traces of much, but the truck was maybe a hundred feet from the highway, and there were cacti and scrubby plants and things between the road and the truck. There weren’t any smashed plants until she got fifty feet out from the road, and then she could follow the damage as the truck rolled and bounced to a stop.
She found some other crushed plants, but they were way away from anything else damaged. It was like …
She went up higher and looked over everything. Then she flew over to Jack in a hurry. “Jack, I found something.”