A million concerns flowed through my mind, questions of morality chief among them. I wondered about the soul. Did Maxwell have a soul? She didn’t behave like Smoltz—clearly his soul had departed and never returned—but she, in essence, was just like him.
I wished I’d stayed in bed that morning.
“Now, the problem we’re facing doesn’t have anything to do with Operation Captain America. External events triggered some kind of reaction in the atmosphere, causing the dead to rise up and walk.”
“Watson mentioned that,” I said.
“Watson talks too much.”
“Maybe not enough,” I didn’t like where this conversation was going. The last time Henry and I had a face to face, I ended up in the desert with a slug from an AK47 embedded in my gut.
General Henry liked to sit down with his officers and explain missions to them in person. Of course, his explanations lacked simple honesty, but he typically veiled that behind fiery speeches of patriotism and honor.
This was the case when Henry sent me to Libya with a small squad ordered to neutralize a small arms dealer. The general promised full air and sniper support, but in the end, it was just me and my five-man squad left to be slaughtered.
I should have died that day, but I managed to evade both death and capture. The details of my escape are fuzzy at best, but I remember the rat-a-tat-tat of the rifle fire and the warm sensation as a slug struck me with vivid clarity. I spent the better part of the following year in a coma. My last memory of that day was laying on the floor of a Huey with a broad face hovering over me shouting for medics. That was the second time I met Sergeant Smoltz.
“Be that as it may, we got a job to do.” The general slid open a desk drawer and produced several satellite photos.
He tossed the pictures on the desk in front of me.
The pictures were standard, grid based images of the countryside. The only thing unusual about them was the inordinate amount of red dots. I knew from years of experience that these dots denoted hotspots. Question was – what kind of hotspot?
I frowned. Henry’s smug smile, at long last, faltered.
“I hope this isn’t what I think it is.”
“It is. I have no answers as to why, but the dead are rising seemingly everywhere.” Henry crushed his cigar out. I suspected he used that as a device to break eye contact with me.
“Do we have anything to do with this, general?”
Henry’s eyes flicked up and met mine for a moment, then quickly looked away.
“It’s hard to say, Jack. I normally wouldn’t volunteer this much info, but I need your support on this. I will say it’s a hell of a coincidence if our work here doesn’t factor in to the phenomenon. However, there’s little doubt the meteor shower is the primary influence.”
I sighed. By support, I knew he meant a mission.
“What do you need me to do?”
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