Dean Dreiser did not want to start his day viewing a biologically hot, still decomposing body. He preferred stiffs with bullet holes.

He shuffled out of the central command trailer, convinced the biohazard suit he wore had been designed to amplify the desert’s heat. It occurred to him he should have taken his dad’s offer to help with the family’s Brazos River guide business. Why the hell did he think he needed to be a government agent?

If he weren’t an agent, he wouldn’t be working for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If he didn’t work for USCIS, he wouldn’t be in New Mexico at White Sands Missile Range. At forty miles wide and one hundred miles long, God had forsaken this land long before the U.S. government arrived.

“This way, Agent Dreiser.” The lab doctor took off on a southeast heading, assuming Dean would follow.

The man had to be at least seventy and looked as if he’d been in the desert most of those years. His skin had wrinkled up so that he resembled a prune more than a person. By Dean’s calculations, the old guy didn’t weigh enough to keep his biohazard suit from floating off the desert floor.

        Ten yards away, the good doctor noticed Dean had stopped. He turned with the impatient expression of someone who had important lab experiments to run and demanded, “Is there a problem, Agent?”

They could communicate through a universal intercom system within their suits, a fact that had Dean at a distinct disadvantage. He knew the doc’s security clearance, but he did not know the clearance level of every man on this frequency. He’d learned last year what a single security breach could do, and he wouldn’t risk it again.

That security breach had come in the form of an agent Dean had met only once—Keith Servensky. A mole inside USCIS, the bastard had nearly killed Dean’s best friend and one of their best agents. If someone had checked Servensky’s security clearance at every point in the mission, he would have been stopped before he’d done any harm. Instead, he’d pushed his way into operational maneuvers above his level. In the confusion of the moment no one had stopped him. As a result, he was complicit in Operation Dambusters and the killing of thousands in Bath County, Virginia.

Dean wanted his weapon, and he didn’t want to state why on an open frequency.

            Doctor Kowlson—Dean could see his name sewn on his BHZ suit now that he’d stomped back to join him—raised his left hand, pointed at the blue intercom button, and pushed it. “This opens a direct channel between the two of us. Now, is there a problem, Agent?”

“The problem is my weapon is still in the trailer, and even if I had it, I couldn’t very well use it while I’m in this suit.”

Doc Kowlson held his gaze for a count of five, then glanced toward heaven as if to pray for mercy. Finally he held up his hands, as if in surrender. He looked to Dean like the Pillsbury Doughboy, hands waving in the morning heat.

Kowlson used his white gloved fingers to enumerate each point, as if the visual would lend credence. “One. You’re surrounded by armed military personnel, so one less weapon shouldn’t concern you. Two. The threat we face is biological and therefore microscopic. You can’t shoot it. Three. It’s a fucking ninety-eight degrees and rising, and I’d like to finish before it reaches one-hundred-and-ten. If you don’t mind.”

Without waiting for an answer, the good doctor shuffled off. Dean had never been put in his place by a Doughboy, and he still wanted his Glock on his person where it belonged. But ten years in active operations had taught him some battles cost more than their net worth. The New Mexico sun combined with the two dozen guards holding a ready military stance—and no biohazard suit—confirmed this would be one of them.

Dean took off after the doc. For a little old guy he moved with amazing speed.

They reached the front of the site in ten minutes. The biohazard dome stretched roughly the size of half a professional football stadium and rose out of the desert like some freakish giant jelly fish. All to cover the location of one deceased?

Another twenty military personnel surrounded the side they approached from, including guards posted at the single entrance. Anyone going in passed through an ocular scan first. Dean started to remove his helmet, but the guard stopped him. The lieutenant, a young man who couldn’t have seen thirty, placed the scanner over Dean’s helmet and waited for the light to blink green.

The site resembled a NASA moon outpost he’d seen in some old science fiction movie. It was easy to forget Albuquerque lay just seventy-five miles to the northwest. Once the scanner confirmed his identity, the guard allowed him to pass. Dean stepped inside the dome, thinking the inside could not be more surprising than the outside. He was wrong. The facility glowed with enough computer and satellite equipment to run a very large, very advanced op.

As if in answer to his unspoken question, Doc Kowlson said, “All computers respond to voice prompts, since typing in these suits is quite cumbersome. Of course, each computer has to be synced to the operator’s voice nuances. The victim’s body is over here.”

A smaller tent, approximately twenty feet by twenty feet, sat off to one side. A separate air supply ran from this structure into a filtration system and out of the bigger dome to an area Dean couldn’t see.

            “Still a hot zone?” Dean asked.

“Yes, and it will remain contaminated for some time. Possibly years.”

They stopped outside the smaller tent’s entrance, where yet another armed guard stood at attention. This one recognized Kowlson and stepped aside when he approached. Instead of entering, the doctor turned to Dean, held out a hand to prevent him from going any further.

“Do you have any firsthand experience with victims of biological attacks, Agent Dreiser?”

“I’ve seen plenty of vics, Doc.”

Kowlson paused, then nodded. “I’m sure you have. Biological weapons have a way of degrading the body, as you’ve been taught. It can be disorienting when you witness this. The body has a natural reaction, wants to reject what it sees—often by vomiting. You must fight this response since you’re in a biohazard suit. Under no circumstance should you attempt to pull off your hood, or one of the men inside will shoot you with a tranquilizer.”

“I appreciate the lecture.” Dean shifted in his suit, but never broke eye contact with the doc. “I have a terrorist to catch, so can we get on with this?”

He saw something less cynical appear in Kowlson’s eyes, then it vanished like a fleeing shadow. It wasn’t a look of doubt—regret maybe. Before he could figure out why the man might have misgivings, they entered the hot zone.

“Push your yellow com button. All communication within this zone must be recorded.”

Dean pushed the button. Let the shirts in Langley review his every word from their safe distance. If he did his job well, they’d have that luxury. If he didn’t, no doubt Virginia would be on the target list.

            Four additional guards stood watch over the victim inside the tent. They stood at rigid attention—their weapons at the ready. Their eyes never met Dean’s. They reminded him of the sentries posted at the unknown soldier’s grave in Washington D.C.

Even through his suit, he noticed a marked drop in the temperature.

“The colder temperature maintains the integrity of the body,” Dr. Kowlson said.

The young woman, if she could still be called that, lay on the floor in the middle of the area. She wore hiking clothes—khaki shorts, a t-shirt, and sturdy boots. The shirt had been sheared up the middle for the preliminary autopsy.

Dean’s first sight of the victim told him why Kowlson had felt the need to issue his warning. He’d seen many victims in various stages of dismemberment, but he’d never seen one with most of their skin dissolved.

He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat, kept his hands still at his side. Some lab technician outside would be reading his heart rate. Fuck them. Anyone who could look at this poor girl and not register an increased heart rate wasn’t human.

            “Estimated time of death?” Dean forced his voice to sound normal.

“Less than twelve hours ago.”

“How is that possible?”

“This agent works quickly, as weaponized forms usually do. I would like to say her death was painless, but my medical opinion is, it was not.”

Dean glanced up as new guards replaced the men who had been standing there.

“We rotate guards every seven minutes. We’re fully protected in our suits, of course, but it makes everyone feel better—psychologically—if we rotate the personnel.”

“Who found her?”

“Two hikers who were, let’s say, lost.”

“What will happen to them?”

“That is not my problem, or yours.”

Dean willed his feet to step closer to the girl. His skin began to tingle and burn, but he recognized it as a psychosomatic response to what he was seeing. He wanted the expression of horror on her face engraved on his memory. The more he understood of what she had endured, the better chance he had of catching these bastards. And he would catch them.

“Why is only the hair from the front half of her scalp gone?”

“A good question. When she inhaled the bio-agent, it went to work immediately, dissolving the skin around her face. The hair at the front of her scalp lost purchase and fell out. The agent then travelled down the bronchial tube toward her lungs, which is why you see the burn marks down her throat.”

“She didn’t grab her neck?” Dean squatted beside the body.

“She didn’t have time. That would have been a natural reaction to a tickle along the throat. But at the same time her esophagus began to burn, the bio-agent paralyzed all the neurons in her brain. Although she wanted to grasp her neck, her fingers had forgotten how.”

“She would have collapsed then.”

“Yes, but she wouldn’t have been able to crawl or move.” The doctor now spoke in a clinical, detached tone.

“She would have been conscious?”

“So our preliminary results indicate.”

“For how long?”

“Perhaps ten minutes. No longer. Much of her skin dissolved causing her to sustain a great amount of blood loss. She bled out. That, technically, would be the cause of death. It would have been a very agonizing ten minutes.”

Dean had all the information he came for, but he stayed a moment longer, stared into pale blue eyes that would never again see a New Mexico sunrise.

“Approximate age?” he asked softly.

“Early twenties.”

Dean stood and made eye contact with Kowlson who nodded toward the opposite end of the tent.

            They exited out a different door, where they passed through three different showers. Dean would have stood through a dozen had he been ordered to—anything to mitigate the burning and itching that had begun in his throat but now had spread to every inch of his body. Then he stripped and stood under two additional showers, dressed, and again submitted to the ocular scan. Stepping into the desert sun, he took a deep, steadying gulp of fresh air.

As an afterthought, he turned back to the guard. “We’re being extra careful that the same folks who go in, come out.”

The lieutenant—this one a woman and no older than the one at the entrance—didn’t bother to reply.

Dr. Kowlson joined him, and they made their way back toward Dean’s once-red Jeep. A layer of dirt made it nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding desert. Anyone watching would be hard pressed to name the color, or year, for that matter. The Jeep had seen better days, as had Dean.

He could have been imagining it, but the old guy seemed less pissy.

“You handled yourself well in there,” Kowlson said.

“It’s my job, sir.” Dean held out his hand, shook the doc’s, then climbed into his Jeep. “What kind of bastards create something able to do that?”

“The worst kind. Ones we haven’t had on our soil before.”

Dean stared out through his windshield, but made no move to drive away.

“We’re sending you the best person we have in bioterrorism,” Kowlson said. “She’s a genius in the area of bioweaponized agents, and she completed field ops training last month. Her name is Dr. Lucinda Brown. She’s better than whoever did this.”

“She’ll have to be.”

Kowlson nodded and stepped back. They both recognized the task facing them was daunting, had both received the same encrypted message from headquarters three hours earlier:

Terror alert critical. Attack imminent. Message received and confirmed—

What you will find in the desert is only a taste. You cannot stop the justice you deserve. We will strike where you will suffer the most. We will strike swiftly. We will strike soon.

While the terrorists hadn’t made any demands, they had made themselves clear. According to their analysts, the attack would occur in ten to fourteen days, and the weapon would be dispersed over a minimum of six major metropolitan areas. No why. No terms of negotiation. Only the threat and the proof they could do what they claimed.

Dean started the engine and drove through the makeshift military facility that had been set up around the victim’s body—a body found in the middle of a government base. As he drove the sun continued its daily climb, oblivious to the plans of men.

Why New Mexico, why now, and why on his shift? Why had the terrorists even bothered sending the message? It had told them nothing, but had managed to put them on alert. Why would they want to do that?  Commander Martin had relayed nothing else. More data would come from the body of the girl. Bodies always gave up their secrets—eventually.

Dean pulled to the side of the road in time to vomit up the little he’d eaten for breakfast. He grabbed a bottle of water from behind his seat to wash the taste of sour coffee out of his mouth. They’d never shown him corpses with no skin in ops training. He’d battled many terrorists in his ten years, but he’d never dealt with one his trusty Glock couldn’t kill.

Leaning against the door, he gazed out over the barren landscape.

Dr. Brown better be as good as her reputation. USCIS had staked all their lives on it.

Published in 2010 in conjunction with Tekno Books.  Copyright 2009 Drue Allen.