Page 40 of Unrest
He sighed. “No rest for the weary anymore.”
We sat there quietly for a while. It was strange to have downtime while at work. But as sore as I was, I shouldn’t complain about a chance to just sit.
“Were you stationed here at Dugway when everything happened?” I asked.
His head bobbed as his eyes went somewhere far off. “Yes. There, um, had been some issues on base in the months prior, things that in retrospect should have had us all on guard, but we assumed human error.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Dugway is,was, a chemical and biological testing facility. There were rumors of samples going missing, being misplaced during placement transfers. And then we heard the rumors were false, that it was simple miscalculation and poor record keeping. But those rare strands ended up in water sources all over the country.” He looked at me, and I felt the weight of his words as he continued.
“I got lucky. On the day all officers had been called in, First Sergeant was at my office getting his teeth cleaned. We were ordered to come straight to the Officer Unit. It was the day before D.C. was bombed. As a dentist I’m not privy to the intel of other officers, but First Sergeant worked alongside officers doing top secret clearance. You should have seen his eyes when I got that call, like it was something he’d been waiting for but hoped would never come. His face was enough to make me ignore orders and go with him, and we snagged a couple other officers on our way underground, but it was chaos. Comm shut down that day after the announcement. We couldn’t even call our families.
My stomach dropped. I looked at the ring on his finger. “Your wife?”
He swallowed hard. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come belowground with Top. I would have gone straight home instead. Because those officers never made it back from that call. None of us knows where they took them or what happened. After two days belowground, some of us were panicking for our families, as you can imagine, so they let us out at dark for recon. The entire base was deserted. Every vial of chemical warfare was missing. All of the family housing had been evacuated. My wife and two sons, gone.” His eyes were wet, and so were mine. “I don’t know if they were taken, or if they left to find safety somewhere else, but none of us down here got to say good-bye to our families.”
My throat constricted. After what I’d seen aboveground, I knew the likely fate of his family. I rubbed my palms down my jeans, trying to pull myself together.
I thought about the missing deadly strands prior to the attacks. “So, we were infiltrated by DRI long before this happened?”
He pressed his lips together. “How much has First Sergeant told you?”
“Nothing,” I admitted.
He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Then I suppose I shouldn’t say anything more.”
Frustration rose up. “We’re all in this together, we should all know what’s going on.”
His face remained strained. “It’s . . . complicated. It’s a lot to take in.”
I stood to face him. “I can handle it.”
His eyes fluttered away from mine. “You’ll find out the details soon enough. All I can say is yes. Yes, the DRI infiltrated the U.S. military long before the attacks happened. And nothing is what is seems, Miss Tate.”
His eyes were spooked when he looked back at me, sending an icy finger trailing down my spine. What kind of intel could put that kind of haunted look into a man’s eyes? Suddenly, I wasn’t in such a hurry to find out after all.
