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Our Paranormal Chernobyl
They’d put her on a PRIMUS jet at 7AM, and by 9:30 Agent Laura Pender was touching down at Miegs Field. Welcome home. A metahuman meltdown was in progress, and she was now at ground zero. Roswells were turning up all over the city—unknown, brand-spanking-new metas—and most of them were turning up dead. Somebody in the head office thought of Moab. That made them think of Pender. Four years ago, she and her partner had been first on the ground in southern Utah. A uranium mine, shut down and bankrupt after the collapse of the cold war, had become the graveyard for almost twenty metahumans. It had been a genetics lab: they found gas spectrometers, a Cray supercomputer (cutting edge back then), and metahuman containment devices suitable for use in the finest rooms in Stronghold. Or rather, they found the pieces. Everything had been destroyed; the owners had set off mining-class explosives in an effort to eradicate the evidence and cremate the victims. Body parts of some of the metas survived, whether because of armor-like skin, dense bone structure, or other abnormalities. From those remains and from the ruins, they’d started filling in the blanks. Each of the metas had been base human, and each had been kept in their own armored cell. They were radically different from each other in morphology, genetic structure, and undoubtedly in their metahuman abilities. How the metas had all been gathered, and what they were doing there, might have remained a mystery if they hadn’t had found the miniature man. The found him on the third day of sifting through the rubble. It was a miracle they found him at all. He was deep in what had been an air vent. Three inches tall and dressed in tiny, torn coveralls, the was unconscious and badly dehydrated. They evacuated him to a PRIMUS medical facility in Missouri, and when he woke up a day later, he told them the rest of the story. His name was Harris DuFord. Once he’d been a nuclear safety engineer for Sontag Resources, former owners of the mine. When the mine shut down, DuFord had stayed in Moab, even though there was no work for him. His wife divorced him, he started drinking, and over the next fifteen years he became one of those characters from a Tom Waits song, spending most of his time cadging drinks in bars. Then, a month before Pender arrived, the landlord who owned DuFord’s trailer reported him missing. No one knew exactly how long he’d been gone. From his doll-sized makeshift bed in the PRIMUS medical facility, DuFord told the agents his crazy story. He claimed he’d been abducted by beautiful plastic-skinned robots. They knocked him out, and when he woke up he was in a cell with nothing but a cot and a toilet. They fed him every day through a slot in the door. The rest of the time, they ignored him. But for DuFord it was a living hell. They were making him go cold turkey, and he wanted nothing more than to climb into a whiskey bottle and stay there. Over the following weeks they brought in other people—he could hear them crying or screaming in other cells. Then, a few days ago, they strapped him to his bed and injected him. He thought they’d given him a drug, or perhaps poison, but he felt nothing. Eight hours later they gave him a second injection. And he began to shrink. The other prisoners must have experienced more extreme transformations. He heard the metal doors being ripped from their hinges, and the roaring of voices. Then he felt the touch of another mind—a woman, it seemed—and then screamed when he felt that mind die. Soon he heard gunfire, and the screams of more people. He was now tiny, and feeling like Alice in Wonderland he escaped into the tiny air vent next to his bed. A few minutes later, he told them, he heard the explosions. Pender was never able to track down the criminals who’d created the lab and run this horrifying experiment. The internals of the supercomputer had been incinerated with carefully placed charged. Some of the other equipment could be traced to an original manufacturer, but the paper trail of where it had been bought and sold always ended in a dead end: an auction or sale to an anonymous buyer who paid in cash. From the physical descriptions of the buyers, it was never the same person twice. Pender was shifted to other cases. Eventually she found herself in New Orleans, another hotbed of meta activity, where her talent for finding talented metas was put to good use. And Harris DuFord? He recovered and stayed with PRIMUS for a year—Pender suspected that the agency was trying to find some way to make use of his small size—but then he disappeared. His file was now classified even above Laura’s level. The Chicago PRIMUS office was in disarray. It was a small office to begin with—the windy city had seen little metahuman activity, positive or negative, since the 80’s. There’d been three local heroes in the past decade, two disappearing from activity after less than a year. The exception was Gazelle, a speedster heroine who was active through most of the mid -nineties before being killed in action. The few metahuman criminals that had shown up in town since then had been dealt with quickly, usually by out-of-towners. The local PRIMUS office had downsized over the years to just twelve professional staff and a few para-professionals. She hadn’t decided if they’d grown soft or merely bored. Public Liaison officer Teddy Amidon met her at the airport and filled her in. The staff had been spread out over the city, and almost nothing was going right:
"So who’s the senior agent in charge?" Laura asked. Teddy stared pointedly out the windshield as he drove. Oh. She was now Laura Pender, acting Silver Avenger. The morning didn’t slow down. She had barely had time to get to the office before a 400-foot giant made his appearance at the Art Institute of Chicago, the same building where the DragonLady had died. The helicopter was still unavailable, so she and the only remaining field agent in the office, Sal Ferraras, were forced to drive. They immediately were bogged down by traffic. By the time they arrived, no one was there except for the firemen and traffic cops. Evidently, a group of metahuman heroes had also been there. She knew of Maggie Thorin, of course, and the archer named Crossfire who’d made himself noticed in New York and Miami. But two were previous unknowns: a well-dressed male, 18-20 years old, who glowed with a coppery force field, and a black-clad man in a metal mask who’d survived being crushed by the giant when he fell. This last man had evidently been working with Crossfire; the two of them had saved two cops and a bystander. Then the metal-masked man had disappeared, and Magnitude, Crossfire, and the kid with the force field had left with two Chicago PD detectives. Laura and Sal returned to the office. Two other agents—Vassily Grodenko and Bob Mehldau—had returned to the base after overseeing the transportation to the morgue of three dead metas—all of them immediately nicknamed, of course: "Porcupine Man," "Glass Woman," and "Muscles." The range of metahuman morphology and abilities was as wide-ranging as those of the Moab victims. The missing agents had still not turned up, but the search was still on. And Silver Avenger Pirhu was still not returning his calls. It was just after 1pm when the communications specialist, Duong Thu Dong, burst into the conference and said that another meta had been reported—and this one was alive and kicking, tearing up a Jewel grocery store. The everyone’s eyes turned to her. "Let’s roll," she said. |