Nightstalkers (32 page)

Red: Places the Lindsays dream of going.

“What the fuck?” Roland muttered. He stepped back and looked at the map, noting the colored pins. “I’ve been more places than they even dream of going.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t for the tourism and you usually didn’t land with the airplane,” Doc noted. He pointed at some of the pins. “And it wasn’t Hawaii or Sydney or Hong Kong. It was usually some place no one wants to go to. Note no pins in Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan.”

“I don’t get this place or these people,” Roland said as they left the room. Not for the first and probably not for the last time.

They reached the sliding glass door that opened to the backyard. The yard had a high, solid wood fence around it. The pool was indeed kidney shaped with a slide. It looked deceivingly tranquil, not like one that had eaten a squirrel earlier.

“How about I throw a frag in it?” Roland suggested.

“We already used our Fourth of July excuse,” Doc said. “And remember what Moms said about dispersing the water.”

“Maybe the girl is wrong,” Roland said. “Maybe she made it up, just to get Nada to pay her?”

“You think?” Doc said, turning to look Roland in the eyes. “You think she would lie to us about this?”

The big man shifted his feet. “Well, no.”

“Okay, then,” Doc said. “I will tell you what, though. You feel like tossing the barbecue grill over there into the pool? Just to see what happens?”

That made Roland happy. He slung his machine gun over his shoulder and slid open the patio door.

“Careful,” Doc warned. “Water can be pretty powerful. People underestimate it. Remember it killed hundreds of thousands during the tsunami.” Doc pulled out his phone and began filming Roland’s assault on the pool.

Roland got behind the grill, turned it toward the pool, and then ran a few steps pushing it, before releasing. The momentum carried it over the edge and it toppled in.

It promptly sank. Roland turned to Doc and shrugged, just as the pool ejected the grill up into the air thirty feet.

Roland dove out of the way as it crashed down exactly where he’d been standing. A half-dozen water tentacles rose out of the pool, groping toward Roland. He ran toward Doc, who slammed the door shut as he passed. The tentacles reached the glass door and began sliding about.

“Why don’t they just bust it?” Roland wondered. “If it can throw that grill, it can bust glass.”

“Fireflies have never been known for their smarts,” Doc said, backing up and tapping Roland to join him. They moved away from the glass. The tentacles finally gave up and retreated back to the pool. Doc stopped filming.

Their earpieces came alive. “Sitrep?” Moms asked.

“We’ve got a Firefly,” Doc said.

“Acme is coming in the gate. We’ll meet you there.”

The radio went quiet. “Keep an eye out,” Doc said to Roland. “I will meet them in the garage.”

He retraced his steps, the eyes of the Lindsays peering at him from numerous frames in every room. He got to the garage as Moms pulled in with Eagle, Nada, Kirk, and Scout. They piled out of the SUV as a Support driver in a Senators Club patrol car pulled in the drive. A man got out and Moms waved him into the garage as Nada hit the close button for the door.

“Doctor Kelsey?” Doc always took points with Acme. “I’m Doctor Ghatar.” Doctor on doctor, it always worked better than Moms or Nada as Acmes tended to view the military as Neanderthals.

Kelsey was a surprisingly young man, one they’d never worked with before on a mission. He had black, thick-framed glasses and carried a briefcase tucked tight under one arm. They always carried briefcases.

“It was a surprise and a pleasure to be called,” Kelsey said. “Very exciting. They picked me up right off the campus at Duke in a helicopter.”

Behind Kelsey, Nada rolled his eyes and Scout giggled.

“Should that girl be here?” Kelsey asked, pointing at her. “I was told this could be dangerous.”

“We gotta kill a pool,” Nada said. “You let us worry about her. She’s the one who figured it out.”

Kelsey forgot about Scout just as quickly as he noticed her. “Yes, yes, the pool. I was given the rough parameters of the situation. A possessed pool. How exotic.”

“It killed a squirrel,” Doc said, “and it almost killed our weapons man. Threw a two-hundred-pound grill at him.”

“Sounds like an angry pool.” Kelsey laughed at his own joke.

No one else did.

“Come on,” Doc said, taking Kelsey by the arm before Nada pulled his machete out.

They trooped through the house to join Roland standing in the kitchen, staring out at the killer pool.

“Watch this,” Doc said, taking out his phone and putting it in front of Kelsey. He played the grill assault.

“Fascinating!” Kelsey said when it came to an end. “The force required to move the water molecules like that in a coherent
form. But I wonder why it simply didn’t break the glass when it came after you?”

Roland shot Doc a triumphant grin.

“And you still don’t know what this Firefly thing is that has caused this?” Kelsey asked.

“Not a clue,” Doc said, which earned him a hard look from Kirk.

“I read the reports on your encounters in the form of Fireflies when I signed on,” Kelsey said. “I must say, they act rather irrationally on all levels.”

“We’re not here to analyze it,” Nada said. “We’re here to kill it.”

“Well, that is the key question, isn’t it?” Kelsey said, and they all, except Kirk and Scout, who’d never worked with an Acme before, knew what was coming: the theories every Acme spouted, proving Kelsey had actually taken some science courses and earned his doctorate. They always went to the theories when standing around a group of people armed with guns and intent on killing something, because it made them very insecure at a primeval level. Like they had to prove themselves to the Neanderthals.

“It depends,” Kelsey said. “Do we want spectacular or clever.” It wasn’t a question and no one replied. They knew they had to wait this through. “From a clever standpoint, I’d be tempted to add cornstarch or some other polymerizing agent. From the scientific standpoint, once the cornstarch polymerizes you have a non-Newtonian fluid. Which means that its viscosity increases with applied force. At the very least that would slow the pool down.

“You put enough in, in this case,” he looked out the window, “I would say at least a thousand pounds, it would make it so that you could actually probably run across the surface.”

“But until it solidifies,” Doc said, playing his role, which was bubble-burster on bad ideas, “you’re slowing it down, but you’re also making it more powerful in potential force and coherence. So we could end with the water taking a more solid form and literally climbing out of the pool and killing us.”

“Uh, well, yes.” Kelsey recovered quickly. “And, frankly, we don’t know how the chemicals that are in the pool will affect the process, so I’d say we move on from that idea. It was just a warm-up.”

“Right,” Roland muttered. He was fingering his machine gun, which Kelsey failed to note.

“Water is tricky. Evaporating it is a possibility, but that would require a ridiculous amount of energy.”

“We can get a ridiculous amount of energy,” Doc said, “if it would work, but I definitely would not want the Firefly to go into a single gaseous cloud, which it might be able to do if we evaporated the entire pool.”

“Is ridiculous a scientific term?” Eagle wondered, which earned him a high five from Scout.

“Electrolysis,” Kelsey said.

“Hey!” Roland stepped forward. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

“Not electrocution,” Doc corrected the big man. “He said electrolysis.”

Kelsey nodded. “Apply an electric field to the water and disassociate the H2O molecules into H2 and O, both of which are gases, but”—he quickly added with a glance at Doc—“not a cloud.” As Doc was about to speak, he jumped into the breach once more. “However, it would be dangerous because it would become explosive, very quickly.”

“Water explosive?” Roland said. “Mac would love that.”

“Who is Mac?” Kelsey asked.

“Forget that,” Moms said. “Continue.”

“The other problem is,” Kelsey said, “I don’t know how to electrolyze that much mass.” He nodded toward the pool.

“Whoa!” Eagle said, getting everyone’s attention. “Check it out.”

A column of water about six inches in diameter was rising out of the pool, straight up.

“Fascinating,” Kelsey said.

The water went up, passing above fifty feet.

Moms was on the radio. “Support, we’ve got a situation here. You might get some calls on a column of water.”

The column was now at a hundred feet. The level in the pool was now down appreciably.

“To keep coherence of that much weight in the face of gravity,” Kelsey said, “is truly remarkable. And powerful.”

The column reached over one hundred and fifty feet, then wavered.

A second later all the water came pouring straight down, splashing into the pool.

“Well, what the hell was that about?” Kirk asked.

“I don’t like it,” Nada said. “It’s planning something.”

“Planning indicates intelligence,” Kelsey said. “The Firefly reports have never been—”

“How do we fucking kill it?” Nada demanded.

“Oh. Uh. As far as electrolysis, it would take more than this house is wired for anyway. Too much thermal mass in the water. Going back to the cornstarch, we could add a zeolite.”

“A what?” Kirk asked.

“The stuff that comes in those little packets in things like baby diapers; my wife just had a little boy by the way. Those packets are stamped ‘Do not eat’ and it makes diapers ultra-absorbent. Hmm, you know, if you add a strong acid to water it becomes exothermic.
You can boil a pot of water just by pouring acid into it. Again, though, it would take several tankers full of acid to tackle this.”

“I can get several tankers of acid here within an hour,” Moms said.

“Cloud,” Doc repeated. “With acid. Not good.”

“Got it,” Moms replied.

Kelsey was off in his theoretical wonderland. “For spectacular, there are things that react negatively with water. Sodium, lithium, and cesium all react violently and produce an explosion.”

“That much water,” Doc said, “and that much metal, we’d take out the entire neighborhood. And it would disperse the water everywhere and the Firefly might stay in part of it.”

Kelsey sighed. “Supersaturated sodium acetate will instantly crystallize when added to water, but you’d need a lot.”

“That still doesn’t kill it,” Nada said.

“How do you usually kill a Firefly?” Scout asked.

Kelsey ignored her. “More simply, how about we drain the pool into a tanker? That would contain it.”

“Unless it decided to punch a hole in the side of the tanker,” Doc said.

“We flame it,” Roland said to Scout, ignoring Kelsey. “If it’s in an animal or plant, we flame it. I usually do the flaming.”

“What a surprise,” Scout said.

“And if it’s in a mechanical object,” Nada said, also ignoring Kelsey in favor of the girl, “we blast it, like the other night on the golf course, until it’s so structurally destroyed that even the Firefly can’t keep it coherent.”

“Be that as it may.” Kelsey was getting irritated that the adults were talking to the child and not focusing on his words of wisdom. “Perhaps we could use Occam’s razor. We don’t know if the Firefly inhabits all of an object or part of it.”

“Part,” Nada said. “I chopped a rabbit in half and the Firefly kept the front going, but not the back.”

“You killed a bunny?” Scout looked about to cry.

“It was a bad bunny,” Nada said defensively.

“Kidding,” Scout said with a playful punch into Nada’s body armor. “Ouch.”

“We divide the water into portions,” Kelsey said, “trying to isolate the part where the Firefly is.”

“I don’t know,” Moms said. “And while we’re doing that? One of those tentacles could eat one of my people.”

“Flame it,” Scout said.

Roland was eyeing the pool. “I don’t have enough napalm.”

Scout shook her head. “What he said earlier,” she jerked a thumb at Kelsey. “Baby diapers. They absorb water, right? A lot of water. But they can also be burned, right?”

Everyone stared at Scout.

“Get me Support,” Moms said to Kirk.

“You’re on,” Kirk replied after tapping his PNR.

“Support. We’re going to need a bunch of baby diapers. And tampons. Enough to absorb”—she looked at Doc—“how many gallons?”

Doc did some quick mental calculations and supplied the number.

“Roger,” Support responded. “Diapers and tampons.”

“I’m gonna need a lot more flamers,” Roland said, smiling at the thought.

Moms clicked off the radio and smiled bitterly. “I remember the code line in the Special Forces resupply report for tampons. They used that as my nickname in the Q-Course.”

“They were assholes,” Roland said.

“Yeah,” Scout threw in. “Assholes.”

Back at the Winslows’, everyone was shedding their vests, armor, and outer clothes, which were saturated with a mixture of water and soot from flamed wet tampons and diapers. Roland had gone through fourteen flamers, another record in the secret history of the Nightstalkers. They’d dashed to the pool in relays, tossing in cases of diapers and tampons, while Roland flamed the surface.