Dark Dragons (37 page)

“Blood and urine analysis.  EKG.  PET and MRI,
too.”

“Don’t forget the spinal tap,” Tony said.

“Say what?” Darren asked.

A wry grin came to Tony’s face, one that said
I got a
secret to tell you, pal
.  He turned around and lifted his shirt tail
to reveal a large gauze patch on his lower back.

“No way,” Darren said, his face just bare inches from the
window to the observation room.  “You better come at me with another dart
gun because I’ll go for the testicles on the first goon who comes within
range.”

“Do you want to know if that growth on your brain is
cancerous?”

Forthcoming words of defiance forming in Darren’s mind
suddenly stopped before they could reach his mouth.  A coldness slithered
across his skin, the source of his excruciating headaches revealed.

“A test of your spinal fluid may not be completely
conclusive than a full-on biopsy,” Towsley said, “but it’s quick and not as
messy as the docs having to peal open your skull.  Sergeant Collins?”

The soldier in the CBRN suit opened the door to their cell,
a service pistol in his right hand, and waited there.

*

The rest of the evening involved irritating medical tests
and tedious psychological experiments involving hidden flash cards, Rorschachs,
and mental puzzles.  After serving him two slices of pizza and a Diet
Coke, the doctors returned Darren to
CONTAINMENT
UNIT 1
around midnight, and he collapsed on his bunk bed without saying
a word to his friends.  He was asleep in five minutes.

The next morning, Colonel Towsley paid the boys another
visit, and this time Darren noticed the colonel’s hard-nosed, drill instructor
demeanor had disappeared.

“Good morning, gentlemen!” he snapped with a warm smile
after turning on the microphone.  “We’re done with our medical
examinations, so you can wipe those sour faces away.  Did you enjoy your
breakfasts?”

“The scrambled eggs were dry,” Darren said.

“The bacon tasted like cardboard,” Tony added.

“That’s BS.  You just had the finest in military
chow.”  Towsley didn’t sit down.  “Our tests have confirmed that none
of you are infected with alien bugs, so we’ll be letting you out of your cell
in a bit to take a breather.”

Darren asked, “Since we’re not infected, are you still going
to keep us in here?”

“I’m afraid so.  We don’t have accommodations for
guests.”

“Look, this is bullshit.  We don’t want to stay in
here.  It’s boring and there’s nothing to do.”

“If you haven’t noticed by now, this isn’t exactly the MGM
Grand.  You’ll each have periods to get out and stretch your legs, one at
a time, and under guard.  You can visit the galley if you like.  We
have some old arcade video games there that our staff plays sometimes to
relieve the boredom.”

“Oh, joy,” Jorge said.

“Right now, I’m here to escort one of you up to General
Taggart’s office.  It’s Q and A time.  Darren, your incredibly
abrasive personality and strutting brutality leads one to believe that you
possess the attributes of leadership and authority . . . so you’re up first.”

“I told you guys yesterday, I don’t have anything to say.”

The door behind them whooshed open, and Sergeant Collins
armed with an MP5 submachine gun this time stepped in.  Instead of yellow
polyurethane, he wore a camouflage Airman Battle Uniform with pant legs tucked
into tall combat boots and a beret with an eagle clutching a lightning
bolt.  He looked business.

“Mr. Seymour,” he said.  “Time for a walk.”

Darren turned to his buddies.  “Later days,” then to
Geils with a scowl, “See you, butt cheeks.”

*

Judging by the distance he had to walk, Darren estimated the
underground base had to be bigger than the Rose Bowl.  He passed a variety
of rooms: the infirmary, a small cleaning room, computer stations and many
doors marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
 
It seemed pretty crowded down here, too.  All kinds of Air Force and Navy
people were buzzing around the place.

After riding the elevator up two stories——Darren counted the
bells——he, Towsley and their armed escort came to a long corridor of
offices.  A wooden sign hanging from the hallway ceiling said
EINSTEIN DOESN’T WORK HERE.
  Below that
phrase, someone had added with a Sharpie “and Carl Sagan is dead.”

“Knock, knock,” Towsley said, entering the last
office.  Four people stood in the room drinking coffee, reading reports,
talking on telephones.

“Come in, colonel,” a man with general’s stars said from
behind a desk.  The name plate on his desk said
LIEUTENANT GENERAL LLOYD TAGGART, CINC, NESSTC.

Towsley saluted.  “Good morning, sir.  Mr. Seymour
is here to see you.”

“Good.  Come in Darren and have a seat.”

General Taggart looked like everyone’s ornery-fart grandpa,
with just a touch of George Patton around his crazy eyes, crow’s feet and
all.  He had a few pounds on him, too, and paper white skin, no doubt from
sitting in offices for much of his career.  His Dixie accent was thick.

“Thanks,” Darren replied with sarcasm.  “I’m glad to be
here.”  Then he noticed the large wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling window on
the other side of the office and the elaborate room beyond it.  “Wow,” he
murmured, his sour attitude gone.  The room resembled pictures he’d seen
of Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center.  “What’s all of this?”

“That’s the Combat Operations Center,” Towsley
replied.  “And this base is the Near-Earth Space Surveillance and Tracking
Center.  We conduct solar system and near-Earth space intelligence from
here.  The same place we spotted you boys with our satellites.”

Darren sat down in the chair in front of Taggart’s oak desk
and looked at the general’s photographs on the wall.  One showed a young
and skinny Taggart standing next to an F-100 Super Sabre fighter with the words
“Yalu River Raiders” written in the corner of the picture.  Another was a
framed reprint painting of someone called General Curtis LeMay, cigar clamped
firmly in mouth, B-52’s in flight behind him.

“I see you’re looking at my pictures,” Taggart said. 
“That’s me stationed in Korea, 1967.  The others are of me in
Vietnam.  I used to fly fighters, too.  Just like you, Darren.”

“You’ve never flown anything like I fly.”

Taggart smiled.  “I’ll agree with that.”  The general
looked around the room.  “You’ve met Major Deanna Weinholt, Towsley’s
second-in-command.  This is Mr. Nellis, our chief astronautics
engineer.  And Mr. Chapman from the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in
Natick, Massachusetts.  They design and build futuristic combat suits like
yours.”

“You’ve never built anything like we have,” Darren replied
dryly.   Darren noticed a rather nettled expression come over
Taggart’s face when the general gave him a look. 
This is going to be a
lively discourse
.  “I’m really glad to be here,” he said with fake
joviality.  “Nice to meet everyone.”

“Excuse me,” a tall black man with a thick African accent
said from the door.  “Am I interrupting something?”  Darren
recognized him as Dr. Ngatia, the physician who had poked and prodded him
yesterday.

“Just a little Q and A,” Towsley said.

“I have the medical reports on the five boys finished. 
I think you should see them.”

“Interesting?”

Ngatia nodded his head, a queer expression on his
face.  “Quite.”

“Come in.  Would you care to hear this, Darren?”

“I know I’m screwed up, so why do I need a doctor to tell
me?”

Ngatia closed the door behind him, and opened a manila
folder.  “These are my summaries.  I won’t have a detailed report
until this afternoon.”

“That’s fine,” Towsley said, sitting down on the corner of
Taggart’s desk.  “What do you have?”

Ngatia handed Towsley what looked like five colored pictures
of a human brain.  “These are three-dimensional MRI-PET scans of the five
boys’ brains.  It appears Mr. Geils Woodbury is normal . . . meaning he
has no abnormalities within the cranial structures.  Notice the
false-color red area of the other four pictures?  That’s the growth I was
telling you about.”

Darren reached up and grabbed the bottom corner of the
paper.  “May I?”

Towsley let go, and Darren examined the false-color
pictures.  Four of them looked similar, including the strange,
spider-shaped splotch stretching from the base of the brain to the top of the
cerebellum.  He recognized the pattern immediately——it was in the same
form as the arrangement of thought-interface electrodes inside his
helmet.  “Is this the tumor you’re talking about?”

“Yes, and we’re pretty sure they are not malignant.  So
you can breathe easy,” he said with a smile.  “But it is very strange that
all four boys have this same, symmetrically structured growth on the posterior
cerebrum.  You see these filament-like structures that radiate out from
the main body?  Some connect to the basal ganglia, which is a region of
the forebrain that plays a key role in
action selection
.  The basal
ganglia generates inhibitory signals to action-generating areas of the brain .
. . I wonder . . . Darren have you recently performed actions you normally
would not have under . . . rational conditions?”

Darren thought of his dive off the culvert bridge and
perfect landing on the top of the semi-truck.  His fight with the Vorvon
assassin.  The aerial rodeo aboard the falling helicopter and spectacular
Tarzan window-crash on his hoist-cable.

“No,” he lied.

“Hmm,” Ngatia replied.  “The filaments also radiate out
to the cerebellum, the pyramidal tract and the M-one region of the
cortex.  These are all areas that control motor movements——muscles and
reflexes.”

“Have you noticed having faster reflexes, Darren?” Towsley
asked.  “Grabbing objects, running, jumping and so forth?”

“No,” Darren lied again.

“Most of these tumorous filaments, however, connect to the
frontal lobe which is involved with higher mental functions.  I have read
about brain experiments on the frontal lobe involving electrical stimulation of
that area, and the subject described an immediate feeling of being watched, and
in some cases predict an event seconds into the future.”

“Precognition?” Towsley asked.

“Future sight, yes,” Ngatia replied.  “That would be
important in a battle if you ‘saw’ a tragic event seconds in the future and
were able to quickly correct it from happening.”

“Have you had a precognition event, Darren?”

“No,” he replied truthfully.

“There have also been reports from the experiments involving
remote-viewing, or able to describe hidden objects.  This could be a cause
for Darren and his friends being able to sense danger when they cannot readily
see it.”

“Have you ever sensed this kind of activity, Darren?”

“No,” he lied.  Again.

Towsley gave him a perplexed look that was totally
fake.  Darren could tell the colonel knew he wasn’t being truthful. 

“I did a little experiment on the boys involving a tennis
ball.  You remember, Darren?”

He nodded.

“It was quite remarkable.  I tested the boys one at a
time.  I had them sit in a chair and close their eyes.  One of my
assistants stood behind them and tossed a tennis ball over their shoulder——and
each one of them snatched it right out of the air.”

“Come on,” Taggart said.

“I have it on videotape, general, if you wish to view
it.  The strange growth connecting to the frontal lobe of the brain got me
thinking about the possibility of ESP, so I wanted to try a simple reflex
test.”

“So where did this brain growth come from?” Towsley asked. 
“Is there some kind of ‘external’ component involved?”

“It doesn’t appear to be.  In fact it seems to have
grown directly from the brain.  How, I do not know.”

Darren knew.  The machine from the alien ship had
apparently stimulated their brains into producing the tumors.

“Is that all, doc?” Towsley asked.

“For the time being, yes.  I’ll have a full report this
afternoon.”

“Well, Darren.  What do you think?”

Darren shrugged.  “I now have concrete, scientific
proof that I’m a mutant space monkey.  I could have told you that.”

“What appears to us, is that your central nervous system has
under gone a drastic change.  Somehow, someway.  And I think we
deserve some answers.”

Darren put his foot up on one knee and played with his
shoestring, beginning to see there would be no way out of this.  He could
easily bullshit his way through the interrogation if he wanted but thought if
he just cooperated, he might get some answers to his questions, too. 
“Fine,” he said.  “What do you guys want to know?”

“Where did you get your fighters?”

“From a ship that crashed in the forest behind my house.”

“Last Friday night?”

“How did you know that?”

“We tracked the ship from orbit.  It took us a few days
to find the crash site, though, but eventually we found it.  And your
fighters, of course.  Were any living beings aboard?”

“No, it was a cargo drone.  Artificially intelligent
auto-pilot.”

“Did you go inside?”

Darren shook his head.  “We just got close to it and
this . . . thing . . . a machine came out of it.  I remember a lot of
machinery moving inside it.  A lot of lights.  It . . . brainwashed
us . . . or something.”

“Brainwashed you?” Towsley asked.

Darren nodded.  “That’s the only word I can think of.”

“Is this how you can fly your fighters?  And operate
your suits?”

“Of course.”

“Fascinating,” Ngatia said.  “Did this machine have any
physical contact with you?”

“No.  There were just lights that came out of it. 
We couldn’t move or do anything.  All I remember were lots of
lights.  A few seconds later it stopped, and the next thing I remember is
waking up the next day lying on the ground where I fell.”