“Where are they all coming from, I wonder.”

Dad sighed. “Argentina and Brazil mostly. There are a few I met from California and one guy from the DC area.”

Kathy wrapped her arms around her knees. “Has anyone told you what’s wrong with the treatment? Why we’re really in here?”

“Pumpkin, I’m not really sure why we’re here. So far, all anyone’s done is swipe my damned forehead to verify my temperature. And honestly, I don’t think these people even know. Trust me, I’ve asked. If nothing else, it seems to me these Air Force folks are just trying to make the best of a crappy situation. The food’s pretty decent, certainly not like your mother’s cooking, but it’s better than any of the crap I was fed by the Army. But…” he said, “I do think I know where we are.”

He pointed to the north. “Do you see that big expanse of white?”

Kathy put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “Is that a big salt flat?”

“It is. And I’m pretty sure the mountain behind it is Bald Mountain. We hiked up there once when you were a kid. Do you remember that?”

“I think so… kind of.”

“Anyway, that means that salt flat is Groom Lake—in which case we’re only an hour or two from home.” He chuckled.

"Dad, what’s so funny?”

“Well, when I was a kid, there used to be rumors about this area—that it housed some secret Air Force base that was hiding aliens. Well I haven’t seen any aliens, but I guess we’ve confirmed the part about the secret Air Force base.”

A secret Air Force base. Where no one would find them. Surrounded by barbed wire, with no explanation why, and no idea what these people had planned for them.

Kathy leaned her head against her dad’s shoulder. “God, I hope this is all over soon.”

###

Juan had assigned Jennifer Green to be the lead tech in the biocontainment lab. She loved that work, and unlike him, she didn’t mind the inconveniences involved with all the safety gear.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t avoid the biocontainment lab altogether. Today he’d gone in there to set up thermal imaging cameras, and now he and Jennifer were studying the results.

“Do you see this?” he said. “The toxic mice in the biosafety cabinet are about the same temperature as the dosed ones, but do you see how much further the heat projects off of them?”

Jennifer lumbered over to him in her pressurized suit and studied the camera screens. Her voice came through the speaker in Juan’s suit. “That is strange. The infected mice have a run-of-the-mill thermal profile; they’ve got a fever, but the temperature gradient drops off like normal. But waves of heat are coming off of those toxic guys.”