Ghostwalk

The expression of gratitude on Gray’s face turned to resentment. “Like what?”

“What do you think, dipshit?” Edward barked. The ex-Mag from Samariumville marched forward and prodded Gray roughly in the ribs with a boot.

“Information.”

Edwards, whose head was shaved, wasn’t as tall as Grant, but he was almost as broad, with overdeveloped triceps, biceps and deltoids. He usually served as the commander of CAT Alpha in the absence of Kane and Grant.

“I don’t know anything,” Gray retorted. “I’m just a grunt.”

“That’s the pat response we expected,” Grant rumbled. “I’m sure you can guess our response.”

He positioned his right boot over Gray’s bandaged ankle and, balancing on his heel, slowly began exerting downward pressure.

Gray swallowed hard. “Okay, okay.”

Grant lifted his foot, but kept the thickly treaded sole hovering over the millennialist’s ankle. “Okay what?”

“If you’re here at all, you probably know as much as I do about the operation.”

Kane repressed the urge to exchange meaningful glances with Brigid and Grant. In truth, Cerberus knew very little. The information about sudden and suspicious activity on the outskirts of the little settlement near Los Alamos had reached them by the most inefficient of means—by word of mouth.

The information had been conveyed along a chain of Roamer bands until it finally reached the ears of Sky Dog in Montana. He in turn had brought it to the Cerberus redoubt, cloistered atop a mountain peak in the Bitterroot Range.

“Tell us what you know, anyway,” Brigid said smoothly.

Gray gestured vaguely in the direction of the sand dunes and mesas. “You’re familiar with the mandate of the consortium, right?”

Grant nodded brusquely. “Yeah. To dig out old predark tech, polish it up and try to figure out a way to use it to enslave your fellow human beings.”

Gray frowned at him. “If you want to believe that about us, go ahead. It’s not true, but keep on believing it if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Thanks,” Grant retorted. “I will.”

“Get back to the subject,” Kane said impatiently.

“Like for instance, why were you patrolling out here with a silenced weapon?”

Fear flickered in Gray’s eyes. “We didn’t want to draw attention if we had to shoot at something.”

“Whose attention?”

Gray shifted uncomfortably, fingering the bandage around his ankle.

“Whose attention?” Kane asked again, a steel edge in his voice.

Gray inhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixed an unblinking gaze on Kane’s face and whispered, “The ghost-walkers.”

Chapter 3

“What the hell does that mean?” Kane demanded.

Mr. Gray swallowed the pentazocine tablet handed to him by Brigid before answering, “I don’t really know much. Just what I was told.”

“Which was?” Grant challenged.

“We’ve had reports from the locals that when anybody starts digging around Phantom Mesa, ghosts show up.”

“Ghosts?” echoed Brigid, casting glance over her shoulder at the rock formations. “Which one is Phantom Mesa?”

“Third from the left…your left. The reports say the ghosts walk around like they’re guarding the place. Supposedly they even kill people who defy their orders to leave.”

“Folklore,” Brigid stated matter-of-factly. “The whole history of the Southwest is a patchwork of legends and superstitions.”

Mr. Gray flashed her a fleeting, appreciative smile. “That’s what our section chief thought, too. But I figure it’s called Phantom Mesa for a reason, right?”

The man’s smile faded. “We’ve seen some strange-ass shit, though…enough so we take precautions. The locals claim the ghosts don’t show up unless you make a lot of noise, so we use silencers on our guns.”

“Speaking of them, where are the locals?” Grant asked.

Gray gestured out toward the sand dunes. “We gave them jobs, put them to work with our excavation crew.”

“Right,” Kane drawled. “I remember the employment opportunities offered by the Millennial Consortium. Another name for it is forced servitude. Just what are they excavating out here?”

Gray shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not sure about anything specifically. But this whole part of New Mexico was a testing site for all sorts of predark research—weapons, aircraft, even genetics.”

“We know,” Brigid said grimly, her face not betraying the involuntary surge of revulsion as she recalled the bioengineering facility known as Nightmare Alley hidden deep beneath the Archuleta Mesa. Several years ago, she had participated in its complete destruction.

“The consortium found a facility in almost pristine condition,” Mr. Gray declared.

“A COG redoubt?” Grant asked skeptically. “Like the one you millennialists occupied in Wyoming?”

The predark Continuity of Government program was a long-range construction project undertaken by the U.S. government as the ultimate insurance policy should Armageddon ever arrive. Hundreds of subterranean command posts were built in various regions of the country, quite a number of them inside national parks. Their size and complexity ranged from little more than storage units to immense, self-sustaining complexes.

The hidden underground Totality Concept redoubts were linked by the Cerberus mat-trans network to the COG installations.

The Totality Concept was the umbrella designation for American military supersecret research into many different arcane and eldritch sciences, from hyperdimensional matter transfer to temporal dilation to a new form of genetics. The official designations of both the COG facilities and the Totality Concept redoubts had been based on the old phonetic alphabet code used in military radio communications.

In the twentieth century, the purposes of the redoubts were classified at the highest secret level. The mania for secrecy was justified since the framers of the Totality Concept feared mass uprisings among the populace if the true nature of the experiments was ever released to the public.

Before the nukecaust, only a handful of people knew the redoubts even existed. That knowledge had been lost after the global mega cull. When it was rediscovered a century later, it was jealously and ruthlessly guarded. A couple of years earlier in Wyoming, the Millennial Consortium had discovered a COG-related storage depot.

Mr. Gray considered Grant’s questions for a few seconds, then shook his head. “Don’t think so. It’s aboveground, not like most of the redoubts. It’s more like a station of some sort, set in a little valley between Phantom Mesa and another one. Very well hidden, unless you know where to look.”

“If that’s the case,” Kane said, “how’d you know where to look?”

Gray shrugged. “Our section chief knew where to look, not us grunts.”

“Who’s that again?”