He squatted before the little safe in the closet. He keyed in the combination and took out the sealed orders he had been given. Sitting at his desk, he broke the seal on them and took out a folder in a red plastic binder marked NAVCOM/TOP SECRET, and beneath that, EYES ONLY.

His palms began to sweat. His fingers trembled. He expected terrible things and he was not disappointed. The first fifteen pages were pretty much what he expected—the Lake Vordog mission profile. A series of potentialities that were to be enacted for various situations. And then, on the final page, the desperate eleventh-hour solution should all else fail.

Oh Jesus.

He was shocked, but not surprised. Deep down, he had expected something like this, something catastrophic. Angry, he closed the folder and put it back in the safe. He was supposed to burn it after reading, but he didn’t bother.

He memorized what it said.

He was now the caretaker of a terrible secret.

22
POLLYANNA IS DEAD

After they were back from the city and duly sorted out, Bell began to ask questions because he needed answers. For nearly two hours, Javonivic and Hubbs had been  out of radio contact. He kept asking Javy about it, but he did not receive the answers he wanted. Something had changed in her and he could not quite identify what it was, only that he did not like it. She was always so outgoing, so positive, so motivated, so very dedicated to the mission at hand and the well-being of the team itself. She was a light to see by and a force of nature to be reckoned with.

Or she had been.

Now, as she sat across from him in the galley, she was withdrawn, pale, barely even there. She did not smile. She did not emote. Something had been taken from her, leaving a gaping, bottomless void inside her.

“I need to know what happened in there,” he told her, not phrasing it like an order, but a simple friendly request.

She laughed. It startled him. Her face did not laugh, nor did her eyes. Only her mouth and it had a dry, awful sound to it like a puppet.

“Javy, talk to me.”

She swallowed a couple of times. “We went into the city. We lost communications. I could hear you trying to contact me, but I couldn’t reply. Hubbs and I got separated, I guess. We found our way out.”

Bell sighed. It was like trying to hold a conversation with a wax dummy. He might as well have dropped a dime into her. He’d already spoken with Hubbs at some length, and what he’d gotten from him hadn’t made much sense. Madness about monsters and living machines. Strictly subjective stuff. He was counting on Javy to give him a slightly more balanced, objective view of things.