Winston Chase and the Alpha Machine Page 7

  He’d been slaving away in this complex for the last six years and had little to show for it. If he had his own way, there would be a small army of infected fishermen and farm girls in his laboratory cells, but Management wanted none of that. Experimenting on humans was too risky, they said. Too expensive. Too this, too that.

  But it would get the job done. On that point, Bledsoe had no doubt.

  Patience, he thought. Plan for the World Series, but play the next pitch.

  Three other people in clean suits moved about the cage room, feeding, watering, and recording. All of them had been on the crew for at least two years, and none of them had any notion of the lab’s true purpose. They believed they were testing experimental drug therapies for big pharmaceutical companies.

  Only two other people actually understood the QVs and worked with Bledsoe to tweak the alien organism’s DNA. Both were U.S. military pulled in from different research and development divisions. But this wasn’t the old days. The three of them didn’t hang out after-hours as close friends. They did their jobs, reviewed each other’s notes, and went back to their apartments. They were barely on first-name terms.

  Remembering 1948, that suited Bledsoe just fine.

  His earpiece chimed twice, signaling a new message from Management. He groaned. What now? Had they already listened to his note on the mice and were calling to complain? Without Management’s funding, he wouldn’t have this facility or any way to conduct his research, but that didn’t make their endless ranting any easier to swallow.

  He tapped the button. “Play message.”

  A computer-simulated woman’s voice piped into his ear. “Message received eleven twenty-four AM local. Priority beta. Message reads as follows: Significant movement reported on Majestic Three. Possible identity on Majestics One or Four. A plane will retrieve you at nineteen-hundred hours. Confirm with Management ASAP. End message. Do you wish to replay?”

  “No,” Bledsoe murmured, almost too stunned to speak.

  Majestic Three. The Chase boy. How old would he be now? Twelve?

  No, Bledsoe realized. Winston would be fourteen.

  And Majestic One or Four? Was it possible that after all these years of hunting, they had finally found Claude or Theo? Part of Bledsoe believed that his former friends were gone forever. These days, it was nearly impossible to stay off the grid and defy the resources of the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, and every other U.S. intelligence group. These two men had evaded them all, though. Somehow.

  Bledsoe gazed across his laboratory, viewing it with a suddenly fresh perspective. Five minutes ago, his head had been filled with plans and frustrations all focused around QV development. That wasn’t the real endgame, though. QVs would get him to the playoffs, but he’d never win the Series with that alone.

  In Management’s eyes, Bledsoe was just another easily replaced researcher, even with the QVs in his veins. They now knew pretty much everything he knew, or so they thought. Sometimes, Bledsoe wondered if Management would rather kill him off quietly here in the middle of the ocean rather than risk him defecting to the Russians or Chinese. If they knew even half of what Bledsoe was actually thinking…

  Bledsoe chuckled. No, the way forward was through Majestic One. Claude. His old buddy, old pal. The one who had betrayed him deep under the New Mexico desert and stolen away the last thing that had ever mattered to him.

  Majestic Two.

  Amanda.

  7

  Military Menace

  Winston’s mom appeared in the back yard twenty-eight minutes after hanging up on him. Her diner uniform was gone, replaced by black walking shoes, blue jeans, a purple top, and a black hoodie. He couldn’t recall having seen the outfit before. She had pulled her hair into a ponytail, and her flushed face looked as if she’d been jogging. She still wore her work makeup, so she hadn’t stopped to shower.

  Winston’s mom walked toward him with a bundle of clothes in the crook of her arm. She held the bundle out and said, “Change.”

  He glanced reflexively around the yard. Trees hid him from Progress Oaks, and no one could easily see into the overgrown yard from nearby houses.

  “Why?” he asked, not trying to be argumentative, just genuinely confused.

  She said nothing, only once again put a finger to her lips.

  “Oh, come on. Seriously?”

  This super-secret business was starting to get on his nerves, but her grim, harried attitude and crossed arms allowed for no argument. Winston self-consciously stripped down to his boxers and changed into all new clothes. The gray skate shoes were a half size too small but still comfortable. The jeans fit fine in the waist but were a pinch short in length. She capped off the outfit with a totally forgettable, solid gray T-shirt and a charcoal, thermal-lined sweat jacket.

  “Geeze, Mom, a little overkill? It’s in the 70s, not the 40s.”

  She examined the pile of Winston’s old clothes on the concrete patio, considered them for a moment, then said quietly, “Leave them.”

  Winston stared at her. His mom never wasted anything. And if that wasn’t strange enough, it wasn’t the green Civic waiting for them when they came back around to the driveway. Instead, he found an unmarked, silver Toyota Van apparently made in the days before anyone knew that Leia was Luke’s sister.

  “Holy cow,” Winston said as he climbed into the tall bucket seat. The vehicle only had an AM/FM radio and smelled of old plastic, probably a result of the massive dash baking in the sun for a millennium or two. All of the seats had been pulled out of the back and replaced with faded brown carpeting. A single, large, black plastic garbage bag tied off at the top and lumpy with unknown contents rested behind the driver’s seat. There were no cup holders, no automatic anything except the transmission, and only one DC power port, which currently held a—

  “Oh, wow, is that an actual cigarette lighter?”

  “I think so,” said his mother as she backed out onto the road. “It’s a little before my time. Sort of.”

  Winston looked at her quizzically. “Mom, if just one thing could start making sense today, that would be great.”

  She nodded. “I know. Just let me think.”

  She bit both lips, always a bad sign. Biting the top lip meant anxiety. Biting the bottom meant she was trying to think of a creative explanation for something. Both together? This was going to be bad.

  As his mom pulled the lumbering Toyota onto Highway 217 South, she took a long, unsteady breath and began.

  “I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that a lot has been…that I’ve kept a lot from you. And for that, I’m sorry. I couldn’t be more sorry, Winston. But it was to protect you.”

  She paused.

  Winston tried to break the tension. “You wanna know something funny?” he asked. “This morning, Brian Steinhoff snapped me with a towel in the butt, and the place where he hit me turned blue. Shade said I must be an alien.” He chuckled. “Crazy, right?”

  She finished merging into traffic and gave him a quick glance that told him it wasn’t crazy at all.

  “Oh, God,” he said and put his face in his hands.

  “No, you’re not!” she said quickly. “Not really.”

  “Not really? Mom, there’s a big freaking gap between no and not really!”

  His mother pointed at her own face. “Look at me. I’m human. I’m your mother. You are not an alien.”

  A terrible thought struck Winston.

  “What about my father? All these years, you’ve never mentioned hardly anything about my dad. Were you abducted? Did they do experiments on you and…and impregnate you with some kind of alien—”

  “No! Ew! How could you even think that, Winston?”

  “Because you’re still not making any sense, and that seems as likely as anything else today!”

  “No, it’s not like that,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s like the complete opposite of that.”

  “You did experiments on an alien?”

  Sh
e said nothing. Winston waited. She checked the traffic ahead, then went back to his eyes, keeping silent.

  “Wait. Shut…up. There really was an alien in this—”

  Winston broke off as a name resurfaced from recent memory.

  “Bernie. Mr. A said I glowed blue like Bernie.”

  His mom tightened her grip on the wheel and focused on the road before them. “Yes.” Her brow wrinkled and she cocked her head slightly. “But why would he say that?”

  “I think the rest home was drugging him with something. He seemed really loopy and dizzy. Wait.” He pointed a finger at her. “How do you two know each other?”

  “Because—” She broke off and chewed on both lips some more.

  The air conditioning hadn’t had time to cool off yet, and the sun felt too hot on Winston’s face, the air in the van too close. He wanted to roll down the window and hang his head outside like a dog, if only because then he wouldn’t hear anything else.

  “You know,” she said quietly. “I’ve rehearsed this talk for thirteen years. And now that I actually have to say it, I can’t think of where to start or how to say anything.”

  “Well, we already know I’m not really an alien. That’s something.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were troubled and sad.

  “You don’t know who I am, and you need to. It’s OK.” She inhaled deeply again. “I… My name is not Amanda Chase. It’s Amanda Dabrowski.”

  “I can see why you might change that.”

  She flashed a hint of anger. “It’s a good name. It’s my parents’ name.”

  Winston held up his hands and leaned away. “Kidding!”

  “I was a biologist, with a Master’s from Tufts University.”

  “No way. You’re a diner waitress. You have been as long as I can remember.”

  “I can remember a lot further back than you. A lot. I was hired by the government to do research and development on penicillin production during the war.”

  Winston was more confused than ever. “The antibiotic stuff? But why? Weren’t antibiotics everywhere by the ‘90s?”

  Her bottom lip disappeared between her teeth again as she cast him another nervous glance. “Not that war. I mean World War II. I was hired not long after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Winston…I was born in 1918.”

  ***

  Confused, angry, and filled with more questions than he could prioritize, Winston forced himself into silence to process his mother’s revelation. She left him to his thoughts as they sped along and took the exit for Interstate 5 South. Accusations wouldn’t get them anywhere. He needed facts, starting with filling in the gaps of his eighth-grade education.

  “All right, where do I start?” she mused as she ran a hand through her hair. “You know the United States entered World War II when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, right? That was in December 1941, but President Roosevelt had known that war was probably inevitable. For almost two years, he’d been gathering every scientist and mathematician he could find into government-funded research groups. He remembered how developments in sonar and machine guns swung the war to the Allies in World War I.”

  “Whoever has the best toys wins,” said Winston. “I get that.”

  “But not all wartime research is about weapons. If we were going to have millions of soldiers in the field, the military wanted better ways to keep them healthy, especially after getting wounded. So, I led penicillin research for two years. Then, in late 1944, I went to this conference that brought together project managers from across military research fields, everything from food sciences to nuclear physics. And there I met…”

  She trailed off. Winston saw her swallow and frown slightly. She took a deep breath and started again.

  “I met Claude Hawthorn and Devlin Bledsoe, two of the lead assistants on a top-secret effort you might have heard of: the Manhattan Project.”

  “The nuclear bomb thing?”

  She nodded. “Atom bomb, yes. In 1945 the rest of the world would learn all about the Manhattan Project when President Truman ordered the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was our great new toy, as you say. We won the war, but that was only the end of one crisis and the beginning of another. Japan and Germany were in ruins, but then there was the Soviet Union.”

  “What’s that?”

  She gave him the adult’s you don’t know…? look. As in, you don’t know what a record player is, Mr. Digital Download?

  “Today, it’s the Russian Federation,” she said. “The Soviets were originally allies with Hitler, but when Hitler betrayed the Soviet premier, Joseph Stalin, they switched sides. The Allies needed Russia to help beat Germany, but everyone knew that Stalin was just as vicious and murderous as Hitler. After the war, America was the only superpower on the planet, but Stalin was determined to change that — and he did.”

  “He wanted nukes,” ventured Winston.

  “And he got them. Long story short, that was what kicked off the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. We had nukes. The Soviets had nukes. And you only had to see the radioactive fallout and massive rise in Japanese cancer rates to know that if we got hit with a nuclear attack, the devastation to our country and people would be unimaginable. There was no known way to cure biological damage from radioactivity, but the government was willing to try. We knew that if it ever came to World War III, the winner, if there is such a thing, would be whichever side got less sick in the aftermath.”

  Winston connected the dots. “And you were a research biologist.”

  “Yes. It was the first time that biology and nuclear physics went together like chocolate and peanut butter. The government set up a secret research facility in Nevada and brought together the best people in the field to work on the problem. That was how I ended up back together with Claude, Devlin, and…” She paused again, expression distant. “…a close friend and colleague of Claude’s named Theo. He arrived the following year.”

  Winston raised a hand as what she’d said struck him. “Wait. A secret facility in Nevada? Mom, are you talking about Area 51?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know what the Soviet Union was but you know Area 51? That’s just great. Are they also teaching you about Pokémon in World Cultures?”

  “Anyway.” Winston blew aside her sarcasm. “Was it Area 51?”

  His mom cleared her throat. “Not exactly. It had no name. Everybody referred to it as Area X. Area 51…came later.”

  “No way!” Winston clapped his palms against his thighs. “My mom worked in Area 51! That’s so awesome!”

  “Do you want to be quiet and learn something or not?”

  Winston muttered “still awesome” under his breath but otherwise fell silent.

  “I became friends with the three men. Working fourteen-, sixteen-hour days, we didn’t get much free time, and it was lonely out in the middle of nowhere. But Claude and Theo were great. They were kind and always helpful. Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in that desert. It was only later that the three of us shared that ‘finches fly in the fall’ phrase, in case there was an emergency and we had to run suddenly.”

  “Hold on. You had three friends. What about the third guy?”

  She narrowed her eyes, as if debating. “For a long time, we didn’t see Devlin Bledsoe as a threat, even though he was different. Very smart, very ambitious. All three of them were important in the success of the Manhattan Project. Something inside of Devlin was broken, though. He scared me.”

  “But you were saying about Area 51…” Winston prompted as he glanced out the window.

  They were in the middle of downtown Portland, taking the Marquam Bridge over the sparkling Willamette River. Winston never spent as much time exploring downtown as he wanted. Hopefully, as he got a little older, his mom would loosen his leash a bit and let him go explore all of the shops, museums, parks, and other things missing in boring little Beaverton.

  “On July second, 1947,” she continued, “an unknown fo
rm of aircraft crashed in the desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico. The crash site was a three-hour drive from Alamogordo, where the U.S. had conducted its first atomic bomb tests only a few years before. The Army didn’t think that was a coincidence. That night, troops cordoned off the area and swept it clean. It was no ordinary aircraft, as you’ve no doubt guessed.”

  “A UFO?” Winston was practically jumping in his seat.

  “There was an alien still alive inside the craft,” she said.

  “Intense!”

  “Two days later, we received new orders from the president himself. The spacecraft contained some sort of nuclear technology we’d never seen before. Radioactive readings spiked all over the crash site. Everyone had been dosed with it. But the alien — we named him Bernie — showed no sign of radiation sickness. He was immune. The potential answer to our prayers and research had literally fallen from the sky. The spaceship and everything in it became the center of our new world. It was called Project Majestic.”

  “What did he look like? How’d you know Bernie was a he?”

  His mom frowned, trying to remember. “We weren’t sure if Bernie was male at first. He had no discernible male organ.”

  “You mean a penis?”

  She cringed.

  “Mom, I’m fourteen. You can say penis instead of discernible male organ. Geeze.”

  “His body was hairless and quite thin,” she continued quickly, “but the hair on his head was completely white and down past his shoulder blades.”

  “He looked human? Not like…I dunno, a Wookiee or Jell-O or something.”