“But does any of this sound familiar?”
“Z…” Cody put the cap back on his marker and turned around to face me. “They tried everything out there. It is so damn top secret that even though I’ve worked on the DOE contract for the last twenty years, I don’t know a tenth of what laws of the universe they violated.”
“I’ve been a scientist most of my life. I believe in the pursuit of knowledge above all,” said an unfamiliar man with a proper British accent. I realized that he was one of the academics from the ICMHP curriculum. At least some of the non-Hunter guests weren’t totally useless. “But what they did there? Bugger that. I’d rather go back to rubbing two sticks together to make fire.”
“They poked God in the eye,” said the Israeli. He made a two-fingered poking motion, like unto the Three Stooges. “Poink. He was not amused.”
“Desperation makes you stupid,” Cody said. “They’d been working for a while before Decision Week happened. Nobody knows what set it off. Several of the experiments went horribly wrong all at the same time. Reality was ripped to shreds. Men mutated. Turned into insects, incorporeal wraiths, you name it. Some were found with their bodies partially fused into solid objects. Portals were opened to who knows how many dimensions. Ancient gods were communed with, Aztec to Zulu and everything in between. Brilliant men were driven mad. A Nobel Prize winner grew an extra eye in his forehead. Some minds switched bodies. They had this one janitor, his tongue grew its own mouth, complete with tiny little shark teeth, and then started communicating…in Latin. A better question, Z, is what didn’t happen at Los Alamos.”
Lee was taking rapid notes. “Tongues with teeth? That’s awesome.”
“Not for the fellow whose tongue began talking to him, I’d imagine,” Paxton said. Even in her armor she still reminded me of a Cub Scout den mother. Even the werecat on her team patch was cute.
Cody continued, “Our problem now is deciding which, if any, of those harebrained experiments we’re dealing with here. All of the experiments were potentially war-ending weapons, but some turned out to be far more dangerous than others. None of the possibilities are good, and this quarantine indicates that the government has decided this is one of the bad ones, but obviously not the worst.”
“How can you tell?”
Cody shrugged. “They haven’t bombed us yet.”
I was sorry I asked. Before I could say anything else, someone bumped my elbow and moved into the brainiac circle. It was Edward. I was shocked to see that Tanya, Princess of the Elves, was right behind him. Surprisingly enough, Edward was standing right next to an elf, and nobody was getting stabbed. From what I understood of those two groups’ history, that was really good. I looked around to make sure Skippy wasn’t here too, because seeing those two together would cause him to lose his mind. Luckily, no Skip. Edward, as usual, was entirely covered, wearing mirrored shades and a ski mask. As a Newbie, Tanya hadn’t been issued armor yet, and was wearing a too-tight tank top and jean shorts. Apparently she was pretty confident she was going to pass training, since she’d gotten the MHI logo tattooed on her ankle. With her hair hiding her pointy ears she could at least pass for a human being, but she really didn’t look like she fit in with this crowd.
Even though he’d already gotten my attention, Ed bumped my arm again. It was odd to see the orc so willingly enter a room full of humans. “What’s up, Ed?” I looked at the non-MHI Hunters. “This is Edward, my administrative assistant.”
“Tell them, Ed,” Tanya said. She put her hands on his shoulders and shoved him toward the table. Still no stabbing. I was impressed. Edward grunted at Tanya to quit bugging him, then reached into his black coat and pulled out a cloth. He set it down on the table and gently unrolled it for all of us to see. The smart Hunters leaned in.
It was a fuzzy little lump of pointy flesh. “That’s from the spider?” Lee asked, instinctively moving back from the table. I remembered Ed chopping the end of the limb off and his cryptic words about it not being real. The orc pointed at the thing, as if to say, see?
“What? I don’t get it?” Cody said.
“Ed says it’s fake. It ain’t real and stuff,” Tanya explained.
Curious, Lee overcame his dislike of giant spiders and came back over to squint at the piece of leg. “Hmmm…You know, there is something weird. I’m no biologist…” Albert Lee knew more about giant spiders than the rest of us, since they had been his initial exposure to the world of monsters, had killed a bunch of his friends, and nearly cost him his life. “The hair is wrong. This is like fur. The ones I’ve killed had bristles. And the bottom is wrong. This is like a spike. The other ones had a sort of pad.”
Ed shook his head in the negative and grunted angrily. A knife materialized in his hand. I knew from experience he usually had a dozen of those stashed. He pointed the tip at the leg and made a poking motion. I tried to see what he was getting at. There was a bunch of sand that I hadn’t noticed in the cloth before, but other than that, it looked like the end of a spider leg, only it was about the size of a hot dog. Then Ed took the knife and began mashing the leg violently with the flat of the blade.
It crumbled into sand.
“What the hell? Can I see that?” Cody took the knife from Edward and scooped up some of the dirt. Half of the sample still looked like the leg, black, hairy, and distinct, but at the edge of where Ed had smashed it, it simply turned into brown sand. “I’ll be damned.”
“The magic on it has worn off. He showed it to me first,” Tanya explained proudly.
“Fake…Moosh,” Ed explained. He looked around at the humans, seemingly embarrassed to have said anything. By Edward’s standards of communication that had been a doctoral dissertation.
“Good work, Ed,” I told him.
The brainiacs were intrigued by this new development. “Z, is this what the soil in that area looked like?” Paxton asked.
It was hard to tell. It all looked like sand to me, and much of it had been covered in snow. “Pretty close, I guess.”
The smart Hunters began to jabber excitedly. Cody gave Edward his knife back. “Ah ha! Matter organization at the origination site! That narrows down the possibilities.” He uncapped his marker and went back to his board. “If the pocket dimension—”
“It ain’t no pocket dimension,” Tanya cut in, putting her hands on her hips. “Duh.”
“What do you mean?”
“They gotta have a focal point to anchor on Earth. They can’t just pop up. It takes days to stick one on. And I looked all over that blown-up room, and there ain’t no focal point nowhere.”
“How do you know?” asked the Englishman, eyeing her suspiciously.
Tanya was trailer-park elf royalty and proud. She snorted, indignant to be questioned by commoners. “I don’t need fancy schooling to know about magic.” She went up to the board and snatched Cody’s marker away. “Now this is what it looks like when you connect an eskarthi-dor, which is the right name for it. Y’all have been saying it wrong.” She drew some quick symbols. “See? That’s what the anchor looks like. That thing that popped up before wasn’t no eskarthi-dor, but I can probably figure up what it was fast enough.” She looked at Cody’s equation, shook her head disapprovingly and rubbed out a number with her thumb and replaced it with a triangle. “People just don’t understand magic right. Wish I could call momma. She’d know what this was, no problem. Ed, be a love and fetch me a Mountain Dew. I need to do some figuring.”
Ed looked at me, shrugged, and then wandered off to find her a Mountain Dew.
“Diet, Ed!” Tanya shouted, not looking away from the board. “Gotta watch my figure.”
Cody tilted his head to the side and studied the interloper as she continued writing strange Elvish symbols. “And you must be Tanya.”
“Yup. The one and only greatest wizard that’s ever lived.”
“I believe that,” Cody muttered to me, then raised his voice. “Well, you do know some magic, which means you know more than the rest of us. Welcome to the smart team, Tanya…Now give me my marker back. You have to earn your own dry-erase marker.”