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Chapter 182 – Fifth and VineAlex woke up the next morning when her alarm went off. She had it set a little early, so she could wash the mousse out of her hair from last night. The interview had gone really well. Riley and Sam were such a cute couple. But she’d spent so long planning the interview with them, and then recording it until it looked just right, and then checking the footage and the sound, and then eating a late-night snack with them and just chatting, that she had gotten back to her room late enough that she just scrubbed the makeup off her face and piled into the bed.
And boy, did her hair look weird this morning. The mousse had made it look really good the night before, but after sleeping on it, she had mousse bed-hair. One side was crushed in, and the other side was bent at a bunch of goofy angles. So she took a quick shower, and she dried her hair with her brush and her TK, and she was dressed in an old top and jeans before room service brought her breakfast.
She met up with Frank at his truck. He already had his camera slung around his neck. She remembered what he had said, so she had her good Canon around her neck, and her GoPro on a Joby strap at her side. She had her camera pack on her back and her gym bag strap over her shoulder.
“So how did the interview with important people go last night?”
Alex smiled. “They’re both really nice, so it went really well. The main thing is whether anyone will pay me for it. After all, it’s me asking non-nasty questions and listening to two Orphans.”
“Colonel Finn and Lieutenant Valentine?” he guessed.
“Colonel Finn and his wife the doctor.”
He nodded like he should have known. “Right. Dr. Samantha Finn, née Samantha Milicevic. Not a lot of supermodels use their money to go to med school so they can take low-paying jobs saving poor people in war-torn Africa. Other than the beauty and the brains, there’s not a lot about her that says ‘Orphan’.”
Alex decided to spill a little, because a lot of it was in her interview so it wasn’t going to be a secret for long. “Sam’s tougher than she looks. When the Congo Orphans hit her compound, they shot her. Three times. One in the arm, one in the leg, and one in the chest. They herded all the other survivors into the big surgical trailer and locked them in with a huge chain so they’d die of heat stroke the next day. And they shot up the compound sat phone. She dragged herself across the compound and tried to get the trailer open. No luck. Then she dragged herself across the compound to the jeep with the sat phone and pulled herself in and patched up the sat phone enough that someone could call in. By then, she had a pneumothorax and she was having trouble breathing, so she put together a field-medic gizmo and jabbed herself in the side with a huge needle so she could aspirate enough blood and air that she could breathe okay again. And she held out long enough for us to get there.”
Frank checked, “That was just three months ago, so she’s on leave now?”
Alex shrugged. “Pretty much. She’s working with the Quad Cities vaccination program, but she’s probably sitting down all day.”
They chatted about camera brands and expensive lenses and that kind of stuff. Frank insisted that the person behind the camera was way more important than the camera. He told her, “Getting to the right spot and being ready to take a picture is always going to be more important. Who cares if you have the best camera in the world if you can’t get to the photo op, or you don’t know how to capture what needs to be photographed?”
They drove past the building they’d been in the day before, and there were two policemen standing in front of the door. And the buildings on either side had policemen on duty, too.
Frank growled, “Shit! They looked at our film footage and figured we had to be on one of these roofs yesterday.”
Alex suggested, “Terawatt could fly past and check with the SRI agents. That’ll give me a chance to see if our stuff is still up there, and if there are police waiting for us to show up.”
Frank nodded. “Good. And you can fly our crap up to the roof, and we’ll walk in to see one of the offices in the building. It’ll be me and my really uncooperative stepdaughter.”
She giggled a little. Then she asked, “Do you know any offices in the building?”
He admitted, “No. I didn’t see any signs or anything when we were sneaking in. They probably have all of that over by the elevators.”
Alex pulled out her tPhone and used the mapping feature to find the building and look up stuff. “How about … Ooh! How about the law offices of Larson, Larson, and Larson-Edwards? Fourth floor.”
“Sounds good. If the cops stop us, I’ll grump through it and you be really uncooperative.”
“Can do,” she said. “Too bad I didn’t bring any disguise makeup. Other than the valise, which won’t help on this. Some black lipstick would be good about now.”
He smirked. “Too bad your mean old stepdad threw that crap away.”
She grinned back at him. She wondered how many times he’d pulled stuff like this to get past someone to get the pictures he wanted, or to get away afterward. And she made a mental note to add some lipsticks and eyecrayons to her disguise kit so she could look totally different. Maybe a jet-black wig with straight hair, too.
After he parked the truck, she flew into the gym bag and changed into Terawatt. Then she flew out the back side of the parking structure before she went soaring over buildings to the dig site.
Their stuff was still in place, and there was no one on the roof, or on the roofs of the neighboring buildings. But she hadn’t checked the stairwell for policemen yet.
She landed beside Riley and Hank. Jill saw her and trotted over. Hank had three eight-legged walkers that were like mechanical spiders. Each one was maybe two and a half feet across from leg to leg. Hank Marshall saw where she was looking and explained, “They walk better than a four-legged robot. So they’re good on uneven terrain like this. We ran ’em all over the area this morning, and we didn’t get any plants visiting, but it may be that they’re not big enough to attract the thing’s attention.”
Jill added, “So we’ve got herbicide sprayers mounted all over Cat 3, and I’m going to be driving it around the target area while the other five excavators do their jobs. Plus I’ll be wearing a Nomex fire-retardant suit, so if we have big problems with plant-jira, the colonel can pull out the flamethrower and charcoal-broil the bastard.”
Alex managed not to grimace much. “Okay, but if you’re having that much trouble, call me for a rescue before you have to test just how flame-retardant that suit really is. If you open the cab a few inches, I can fly right in, grab you, and take off. And if you leave your really heavy stuff behind, I can fly you out of here instead of puddling you across the rubble.”
Hank suggested, “Or maybe we killed it yesterday.”
Riley pursed his lips. “I’ll believe it when I see a dead root system.”
Hank said, “If it even has what we would consider a root system, sir. It may be more like seaweed or something out of a hydroponic system, or it may be something utterly unnatural.”
Alex asked, “And does anyone know why there are police at the doors to the buildings around us?”
Riley shrugged. Jill guessed, “My contacts didn’t know, but the best film from yesterday came from on top of one of those buildings over there.” She pointed to the south and basically right at Alex’s spot on top of that one building. “The guys running the Davenport P.D. right now are trying pretty hard to look good in the media, so if some of the building owners threw their weight around and called for help in keeping reporters out, there’s probably a response for the next couple of days. Expect they’ll have some sound bite prepped for the department PR guys to go with, like ‘we’re trying to protect the good citizens of Davenport as they go about their daily business when there are threats only a block away’. Or some bullshit like that.”
Hank speculated, “I figured some of the local press asked their LEO contacts to help keep poachers from getting better footage than them, like yesterday. We’re already insisting on no helicopters in the area except the military hardware, just in case of a crisis, and some of the local news-guys were pretty peeved about that. One station wanted to put their traffic chopper over the dig during some non-rush hour times, right up until the colonel pointed out that the wash from the chopper blades might stir up dust with really nasty stuff in it.”
Riley frowned. “And having a news chopper overhead might mean that something with flight could target the chopper or even use it to get out of our control zone, or just use the local chopper as a screen so our military hardware couldn’t target it effectively.”
“Well, thank you for your input,” Alex intoned. Boy, she really sounded pompous sometimes. She needed to watch that. She turned and flew off to the north before going silvery.
Okay, there were police at the entrances to the closest buildings on the north side, too. She did a detour and found the same deal on the west side around the dig. Someone really didn’t like photographers getting up on buildings and scooping other photographers.
So she stayed silvery and flew really low over the rooftops back to where they still had their gear on the roof. She puddled under the locked roof exit door and down the stairs. The ground floor door was still barricaded. But there weren’t police stationed at the stairwell doors.
And why would they need to put police there, when a policeman at any entry door would be able to stop some scruffy jerk with a couple of huge cameras from getting inside?
She flew up to the roof again and over to the parking structure before diving into the back of Frank’s truck. “Our stuff on the roof is fine, but every building around the dig has police keeping photographers out.”
Frank frowned in thought. “We didn’t make anybody look bad, except maybe some other ’togs. You said they didn’t grab our gear, so no one came up there after we left and had a hissy about their building being violated. And you said all the buildings were getting the same coverage, so it’s not one or two Davenport powerbrokers protecting their property. It’s probably a really rich local TV station owner throwing his weight around because his boys got shown up.”
Alex carefully suggested, “Well, we could just go hang out with the other photographers.”
He shook his head no. “Unh-uh. You need to build a rep as someone who wants to pick her own spot and capture her own unique view of the world. If we go wait with the other ’togs, then you’re screwed as soon as another crisis pops up and you have to run off just before Terawatt makes her big appearance. Peter Parker gets in this kind of bind and it never works for him. We’ll find a way.”
She proposed, “I could fly all our stuff up to the roof like you said, come back, and we could just walk into the building. Then we take the regular elevator up to the fourth floor to ‘see the lawyers’, only I pull you into my morph, and we puddle under the doors up to the roof and over to our stuff.”
He grinned. “Let’s try it. Y’know, you could be the greatest photojournalist in history. I mean, you can go into a war zone or a high-security building or a place like North Korea, take the snaps they don’t want you to get, and fly out when no one’s looking. All the problems us normal ’togs have would be stupidly easy for you.”
Alex frowned a little. “Except then I’ll have to explain how I got in there and got the pictures and got back out again.”
He smirked. “I went back and looked at the footage KPVC aired when you scoped out that meatpacking plant. It looked amazing. Risky and dangerous and insane, but absolutely possible. You pulled that one off, so I figure you can fake pretty much anything.”
She blushed a little but she stuck to her guns. “It won’t be that easy everywhere.”
He agreed. “Hell, no. But if you can find a line in and out of a place, even if it would really take most of the Mission Impossible team to pull it off, you can fake it. And you’re a hot babe. You can use that. Parties that ugly ’togs like me can’t get into? A sexy brunette in a shiny minidress and heels would get in with hardly a glance from security. World-class reporters just don’t look like you.”
“What about Joe Frady?”
He scowled. “That guy’s a dick. And he’s too distinctive. I’ve seen him try the ‘secret disguise’ routine and he sucks at it, mainly because he’s got an ego the size of Times Square. You would be great at it, as long as you can drop the shyness and flirt like there’s no tomorrow.”
She decided she’d think about it. She wasn’t agreeing to do it. But she would think about it. After all, it would just be a disguise, like ‘Lieutenant Annie Farrell’.
So Frank put his camera gear away. Then she changed back to Alex, grabbing a baseball cap out of her gym bag, too. She went silvery and pulled the gym bag, her camera bag, Frank’s camera bag, and the cooler into her morph. Then she darted up to the roof of the parking garage, across several roofs to drop off their gear, and back.
She tugged the baseball cap on backwards and slumped. She put an ‘angry Kelly’ scowl on her face. And they walked over to the building. A cop stopped them at the door.
She instantly fussed, “I didn’t do nothing!”
Frank growled at her, “Shut the hell up!” Then he turned to the cop. “What? We’re not good enough to go see lawyers anymore?”
The cop calmly asked, “Can you state your business?”
Frank snarled, “Lawyers.”
Alex whined, “It wasn’t my fault!”
The cop carefully restated his question. “Can you be more specific, sir? We’re trying to deal with a small problem related to the Spencer Building.”
Frank grumbled, “Hell, no. We ain’t sayin’ anything else till we get a lawyer, and we gotta go up to the fourth floor here and mortgage the fuckin’ house to git a lawyer first.”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
“Shuddup.” Frank glared at the cop. “She’s done plenty of crap, but hanging out with a bunch of fuckin’ rich Spencers ain’t one of ’em.”
The other cop gave the first cop a ‘let them through’ gesture. Alex stepped in and waited until the door was swinging shut but still open enough that the police could hear her. “I hate you!”
Frank gave her a big wink. Then they took the elevator up to the fourth floor, while a building security guard drank coffee and kept a careless eye on them. They got out on the fourth floor, and Alex looked for security cameras. She couldn’t spot any, not even hidden in the air vents.
They walked just past the door to the inner stairwell, and they checked to make sure no one was around. Alex pulled Frank into her morph. She puddled under the door, up the flights of stairs, and out under the roof exit door.
When she let him out of her morph, he took a deep breath and gasped, “Crap! How do you do it? I couldn’t breathe the whole time you had me in that goop.”
She admitted, “I never have a problem with that. But I guess you’re not the first person to complain about it.”
* * *
They waited all morning for something to happen. But there was no sign of more vines. Jill operated Cat 3 for hours. It was pretty easy to tell which one she was in, because she was in the danger area, and she wasn’t nearly as good as the experienced excavator operators. Still, she was clearing a lot of rubble, and the other operators were moving into her area a little bit to help out. But by lunchtime her section of the rubble was about ten feet higher than everyone else’s. Alex figured Jill would probably be grouchy about that, since she didn’t like not being really good at stuff.
After lunch, the regular operator took over from Jill, and two more excavators got up on the higher section to help out. Alex hadn’t thought they would be able to climb up the steep slope, but she didn’t know how impressive those operators were. The two excavators put their buckets down on top of the high area and used them to help pull themselves up the way you’d use your hand if you were clambering up a rocky slope. Then they cleared the danger area down to the same level as everyone else in a couple hours. Alex spotted lots and lots of dead vines in the rubble that got cleared there. But she didn’t see any threats.
By quitting time, the excavators were nearly down to the atrium floor level, if she was right. They were starting to dig up some of that fancy marble veneer that had been over the concrete of the atrium, and there was a crushed metal wreck that she was pretty sure was most of one of the chandeliers.
That meant they had to be getting near Birkin. She swallowed.
She clicked her earjack with her TK. “Terawatt to Finn, come in please.”
“Finn here, Tera. Go.”
She asked, “Shouldn’t we have found Birkin by now?”
“Finn. According to Marshall’s measurements, we’re at atrium level. They’re finding atrium floor rubble at the points where the atrium was raised. We don’t know where Birkin’s body is. We lost all the cameras before Birkin stopped moving and the roof fell on it. However, Acid Burn just sent us a projection based on Birkin’s observed movements and the estimated time until it should’ve gotten crushed. Valentine?”
“Valentine here. I’m pulling up the transmission right now. According to Burn’s map, the highest likelihood area to recover Birkin is … God damn it. Right about in the center of where plant-jira was.”
Alex winced a little. “Tera here. That seems a bit too coincidental.”
“Marshall here. Agreed. Especially when Birkin kept modifying its body to survive stressors. If the plant didn’t die in the collapse and it found Birkin’s body, then we might have a really unpleasant symbiosis, or possibly some sort of genetic synergy.”
Great. So far, so icky … as Willow would say.
“Finn. If so, we still ought to be able to see some sign of Birkin. I don’t like this. Hold on a minute or two.”
Alex waited impatiently. Frank just stood there like he could wait longer than she could. Okay, she already knew he could outwait her.
“Finn to team. National Guard agrees to staff the area overnight with heavy weapons teams and a Warthog. Tera, can you stay on watch here until eight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Valentine, you have eight tonight until midnight. Marshall, you have midnight to four. I’ll take four onward.”
“Roger that.”
Alex knew Riley was taking one of the worst duties for himself, no matter how much of an early riser he was. And she knew he was giving her the best time. She said, “I’ll be down there and on duty in five minutes. Terawatt out.”
Frank looked over at her and asked, “What can you tell me?”
She decided to tell him the whole deal. “We’re nearly down to the level where Birkin ought to be, only he ought to be right about where those vines were coming up, which is probably not a coincidence. So we want to watch out for any surprises tonight. I’ll fly all the stuff to the truck and come back for you, but then I’ll need you to haul all my stuff up to my room until I get back a little after eight.”
“And then you’ll be starving,” he smiled.
“Yeah. By then I’ll probably be starving.”
He wondered, “What happens if you don’t eat?”
She grimaced. “Sooner or later, I start getting confused and irrational, and my electrolytes go haywire, and then I’d probably lose consciousness and then die.”
“Okay. Remind me not to let you go hungry, especially when you’re burning calories the super-way.”
She didn’t smile. After the India thing, it really wasn’t funny. She had been so confused and dopey, and she hadn’t understood at all that she was confused and stupid and putting herself at real risk, and she had scared the pee out of Jack and Willow.
She grabbed the camera bags and the gym bag and the cooler, along with Frank’s car keys. Then she flew off to the truck and put everything in the back. She flew back to the roof, and Frank already had the umbrella collapsed and both chairs folded up so the stuff was all set to be left behind for the night. She gave Frank his keys, pulled him into her morph, and puddled down the inner stairwell and out under the second floor stairwell door so they could walk out past the policemen on the outside door.
As soon as Alex got to the truck, she dived into the gym bag and changed to Terawatt. She grabbed four energy bars and squeezed them into her utility belt. Then she flew out the back side of the parking garage and made a little detour so she could fly down a busy street and have people see that Terawatt was on the way to the Spencer Building dig.
She landed beside Jill and the Humvee full of heavy weaponry. The Humvee full of Lieutenant Marshall’s stuff was parked sixty feet away, but there was no sign of the lieutenant.
Jill saw where she was looking, and she explained, “The colonel took Marshall off to get him fed. If you need either of ’em, they’ll have their tPhones on ’em all night long. Me, too.”
Alex nodded. “Yeah. Me, too. If you need me, just call. If you even think you might need me, call. I’d rather get a false alarm than have you get hurt or killed because I didn’t know to get over here.”
Jill looked at the rubble and the equipment. “I’m gonna go get you half a dozen baconburgers and fried chicken sandwiches. In the briefing, Finn said you need calories more than anything.”
Alex smiled a little. “It would be great if you want to get some dinner for you, too, and we can sit and have dinner together. Unless you have somewhere to go or someone to go see.”
“Nope,” Jill insisted. “No dates. No boyfriend. No guys who aren’t scared shitless of the big, bad Orphan. And since the general’s about to get my lieutenant’s rank reinstated, I’ve got to watch the whole chain of command issue, too. I can’t date any of the military guys in the SRI.”
Alex smiled sadly. “That’s utterly unfair. You and Jo should have a ‘single and not happy about it’ club with Janet Fraiser and Sam Carter.”
Jill hopped up. “Some fries, too, and a big Diet Coke?” Alex nodded. “Okay, I’ll be back ASAP and maybe you can tell me how you manage it.”
While Jill was gone, Alex flew around to the various National Guard units and introduced herself. She hadn’t expected that the guardsmen — and women — would think getting to meet Terawatt was a huge bennie. Everyone wanted to shake her hand and thank her for doing what she did, and maybe get a picture with her. And they seemed so surprised that she wanted to thank them for what they did. But she did. They were totally awesome and totally brave, and they totally did not get enough recognition for what they did.
When she flew back to her post, Jill was sitting in the ‘armory’ Humvee eating a hamburger. And Jill had a bunch of food for Terawatt’s mighty appetite. They just had a great time talking about guys and career choices and why Jack O’Neill was both the best commanding officer ever and also the craziest.
Jill laughed really hard when she heard about the My Little Pony codenames in London and Jo getting stuck with ‘Rarity’. “He really called General Hammond ‘Princess Celestia’? Really? Oh, my God that’s hysterical. And he didn’t get in trouble?”
Alex admitted, “I really don’t know if Hammond ever found out. But he has grandchildren young enough to be watching the show, so he’d know what the codenames meant.”
Alex talked about her boyfriend ‘R’ and why R was the world’s greatest boyfriend. And Jill talked about the last date she had, which was weeks ago, and then it turned out the guy was just trying to get a story out of it for one of the local papers. And Jill hadn’t been sure she could complain to Finn, or if he would even be sympathetic, but she gave it a try, and Finn was really upset about it. So Finn called General O’Neill, and General O’Neill said he knew just who to call, and then her creepy date spent three days in the worst jail in the Quad Cities while the FBI and the DIA investigated him.
At a quarter after eight, Frank called Alex on her tPhone to make sure she was okay. She told him she had gotten fed plenty of calories, and she was talking with soon-to-be-Lieutenant-again Valentine.
By the time they stopped chatting, it was after ten and it was more than halfway through Jill’s shift. Alex did a quick flyover and reported there was nothing happening. Then she headed back to the hotel. She went into her room through the air conditioning unit again, even if she had to take off that screen and outer filter again, and then put it back together once she was in her room.
Frank had used her spare room key and put her stuff on her bed, so she changed back to plain old Alex. There was a note on the gym bag that said he was talking with an old journalist friend and he would appreciate it if Alex didn’t drop by. So she hid her gym bag under the bed in the plinth base like usual, and then she took a shower before calling Ray and then calling home to talk to everyone. Apparently, Shar and Dottie were now swapping cookies recipes, since Shar had taught Dottie how to make science cookies and Dottie had taught Shar how to make shortbread cookies.
That reminded Alex of something important, so she had another brownie before she got in bed. Then she tried to go to sleep and tried not to think about anything going wrong at the dig site.
* * *
Alex woke up on Wednesday morning before the alarm went off. There was some noise in the hallway or something. She went silvery and poked a tiny part of herself out under the door so she could peek.
Oh. Frank and some forty-ish woman were kissing pretty passionately considering they were in the hall outside Frank’s door. Oops.
Alex figured it was a really good thing she hadn’t knocked on his door and disturbed him last night. She pulled back into the room and went normal. The whole time she was getting dressed and eating breakfast in her room and stuff, she was wondering why it was okay for guys to be like Sergeant Carlson or like Frank, but it wasn’t okay for women to be like Jill Valentine or Sam Carter, or even like Janet Fraiser. Jill and Sam and Janet were all pretty women who were gorgeous enough to be Hollywood starlets, and it wasn’t fair that also having brains and brawn meant they couldn’t have a totally great boyfriend.
She met Frank for breakfast at the little restaurant around the corner. He was smiling a lot more than usual. She just didn’t ask him why. Since he’d been ‘occupied’ last night, they had to swing past a sandwich shop and get a dozen sandwiches to go and drinks and ice, so they got the cooler loaded up. Then Alex flew up to the roof with all their stuff, while Frank went into the building through the front door this time and met up with her on the fifth floor outside the inner stairwell door. She puddled him up to the roof, even if he did the ‘gasp for air’ thing once she let him go. It was too bad he was over two hundred pounds, or she could have flown him around in her morph instead of him having to do the sneak-into-the-building thing.
It only took a few hours for the excavators to work their way into the atrium floor. And Cat 3 was being extra careful. It was turning up a lot more vines, but they were all dead, and the other ends of the vines were all still pointing down into deeper rubble.
And then Cat 3 scooped up another huge bucket of rubble, and Alex could see from where she was. There was a hole in the wreckage of the floor that all the vines were going down into.
“Finn to Terawatt, come in please.”
“Terawatt here.”
“Finn. It looks like there’s a hole in the atrium flooring that wasn’t there before.”
“Tera. It looks that way from here. And all the vines are going down into that hole.”
“Marshall to Finn. Sir, we could have a problem. What if we didn’t find any sign of Birkin yesterday afternoon because it didn’t get buried and crushed? What if it got punched right through the floor into a basement level?”
Oh, crud.
“Valentine here. In that case, let’s torch those vines and hit that level with more herbicide and more antiviral and more poison.”
“Marshall to Finn. We can probably kill off the vines, but Birkin will adapt.”
“Finn. Let’s do it and see if we can at least make Birkin less of a threat, so we can excavate down to where we can get at him.”
“Or it can get at us … sir,” Lieutenant Marshall cautioned.
So Riley had the six excavators working all over the dig site except around the danger zone. And Alex got totally awesome footage of Jill walking out there with a flamethrower and roasting those vines, which really didn’t like being on fire. They writhed around, and smacked against the rubble, and pulled themselves back down into the hole.
After a couple of minutes with the fires definitely dying out, Lieutenant Marshall flew a little remote control helicopter over the hole and then down into the hole. It didn’t come back out.
“Marshall to Finn. Sir, we have a problem. There’s a large open area down there, and a lot of vines. You need to look at the video feed, but all I could see before the vines took down the remote were coils of vines. And possibly a root system lying in water. We have no way of telling how deep that water is.”
“Finn. Let’s look at that footage and decide on next steps. Tera, you can stay put for right now.”
“Roger that,” Alex said.
She looked over at Frank, who was studying the hole through his camera. “Frank? There’s a big hole down there, and a lot more vines, and maybe water. And maybe something else. We could have a problem.”
He just said, “Not worried. Finn struck me as a smart guy who won’t lose his cool. And if he can’t kill something they’ve got trapped in a hole, I figure Terawatt can.”
She grumbled, “You know, Terawatt doesn’t just automatically save the day. Sometimes stuff is really hard. Or really complicated.”
He smiled a little. “Oh, I get that. I can’t talk about the Colorado op, but I can tell you it took me most of the time in there just to figure out just what the hell was really going on, and then I had to stop it. And then I had to stop it again. And then I had to stop some idiots from making things a lot worse.”
She admitted, “Sounds familiar.”
She watched as Jill walked back to the hole and nearly emptied her flamethrower into it. Then Lieutenant Marshall drove a little Cat loader over to the hole and dumped in two different fifty-five gallon drums of stuff. Alex got really close-up footage, so she was pretty sure from the markings that one drum was herbicide and one was some of the antiviral stuff.
“Finn here. Let’s give the chemicals a while to do their job. We’ll just keep an eye on the hole, and the excavators can work on the rest of the dig.”
“Marshall to Finn. Sir, I’d recommend waiting until, say, two this afternoon.”
“Finn. Sounds good.”
Alex told Frank, “We’re not gonna attack what’s down there until two. And if it has any sense, it won’t try coming back out.”
* * *
So Alex had to sit and wait for hours. The excavators worked away on the rest of the dig. Nothing creepy turned up anywhere else. Nothing came up out of the hole.
At lunch, Lieutenant Marshall flew another remote controlled helicopter into the hole and then back out. He reported over the comms that most of the vines were torched, but there were still vines lying in the water, and a big mound off to one side of the open area that looked covered in rubble but had tons of burned-off vines sticking out of it.
Alex sighed to herself. She figured someone was going to have to go down into that hole, sooner or later. And if that happened, the someone was probably going to be her. Ugh.
On the other hand, she’d feel a lot worse if it was someone else going down there instead. She didn’t know how Jack did it. Sending someone off to do really dangerous stuff was harder than going and doing the dangerous stuff yourself. At least, it was for her. And she was pretty sure it was worse for Jack, even if Willow really liked having Jack stay home and not risk his neck all the time.
A little after two o’clock, Riley directed two of the big excavators to start work in the danger area, with Hank Marshall and Jill standing nearby with weapons. The excavators pried broken and damaged concrete off, slowly widening the hole until the whole thing was exposed. Alex could see from her vantage point that it was a big basement room about sixty feet by maybe a hundred twenty feet, with lots of rubble jutting up from the nasty water. And there was still no way to see how deep the water was, or what might be lurking under the water. Although it probably wasn’t Dr. Birkin in scuba gear, which was just a really weird thought. She had no idea where that came from. Probably from hanging around Jack too much.