Prologue:Scot Thompson wakes up on his boat one morning, at its usual place in the Marina, to the jarring scent of smelling salts. His hands and feet are bound with zip-ties, and there are four men standing over him. The older man, who appears to be their leader, tells him that he had lately been speaking with Zach Brewer, who gave them Scot’s address, and they are interested in what he knows about alien life-forms. He presents him with a briefcase filled with some large syringes, and casually tells Scot that he will get the information regardless, so he might as well cooperate. Scot complies and tells the men everything he knows.
“And this happened in, what, the last year or thereabouts?” asks the man, as he produces a syringe from the case and carefully draws a quantity of clear blue liquid from a bottle. He injects it into Scot’s arm.
When Scot wakes up, he has no recollection of the men being there, or even anything that had happened since about September of 2006. His amnesia confounds his doctors. With no sign of head trauma, they can only presume that it is the result of prolonged and excessive abuse of marijuana and mescaline.
New investigators:
Deputy U.S. Marshall Harvey “Harv” Cole, 37, H-Cell leader (Agent HANNIBAL). Having recently seen his two partners in Delta Green killed in the line of duty (in an episode he will not speak of), his longtime problem with alcohol has escalated dramatically. He drinks almost constantly with little regard for his health or job performance, and this may be the cause of his frequent abuse of authority. Aware of his fragile psyche, he wants to make sure that his co-conspirators are possessed of a strong sense of will. He finds this in:
FBI Special Agent Cornelius Jones, now inducted into H-Cell as Agent HAROLD;
FBI Special Agent Philippe Sangumbo, now inducted into H-Cell as Agent HECTOR;
Also involved in the investigation are two-thirds of M-Cell, namely:
NSA “Black Bag” Operative Seth Carter, a.k.a. Agent MASON: a highly-trained and highly-paranoid recent graduate of the Naval Academy that prefers to live off the grid and leave no trace of his presence;
Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDCP) Medical Examiner Ryan Maraz, a.k.a. Agent MALCOLM: a homely 27-year old workaholic. He is very concerned for the integrity of the conspiracy and wants to know as little personal information about other agents as possible, to the point that he travels by himself.
September 5, 2007:
A bicycle courier delivers packages to Sangumbo and Jones at their office. They contain cell phones. They look like the pre-paid kind – nothing fancy. Shortly afterwards, they receive word that they should “Call HANNIBAL”; Jones deduces that he should dial *HANNIBAL and is connected to a man who identifies himself by that name. They agree to meet at a nearby Starbucks.
HANNIBAL introduces himself by code name and real name, and describes some of the background of the conspiracy to Sangumbo and Jones, hereafter referred to as HECTOR And HAROLD. After a brief interview (for HANNIBAL’s own benefit; “Ms Green” has already screened these two), the agents return to the office.
Their boss tells them that they have been earmarked for a “Bureau Special”, i.e. they have been requested by name to be involved with a case out of the Knoxville Field Office. He doesn’t know the details, but they are to travel there tonight on a red-eye and meet with Special-Agent-In-Charge James Derringer the next morning. Their flight and hotel arrangements are made.
On the flight, they sit next to HANNIBAL, who has called ahead to the Air Marshall and is carrying his weapon. He drinks scotch (three triples) on the flight (“I only drink when I fly”) and they arrive late at the Days Inn.
The next morning they arrive at the Knoxville office. Agent Derringer welcomes them to his office, then closes the door and the blinds. He plays a video for them. It is a security video (black and white, no sound) from a gas station or convenience store. A young man approaches the counter, says something with a pained look on his face, and then punches the attendant. The force of the punch collapses the man’s skull, who slumps to the counter and then to the floor, blood spurting everywhere. The young man looks at his bloody fist for a moment and then starts to press keys madly on the cash register. Finally it pops open, and he grabs a handful of bills. He goes off-camera for a moment, and then is briefly seen fleeing the store with an armload of pill bottles. The video ends.
Derringer explains that the young man in the video is Billy Ray Spivey, of Groversville, Tennessee. Eight days ago he left his home at 9:00pm to visit his girlfriend. He returned two days later, 8:30pm, with no idea that he had been gone for two days but in a great deal of pain. His parents called the doctor, who prescribed codeine, but it did little to help. He had a voracious appetite and ate constantly.
Two days after that, he got into an altercation with his father, and in the course of the argument he punched his father with such force that his hand went through his chest, killing him almost instantly. Following this he fled, and over the course of the next four days held up six more drugstores and gas stations, always taking drugs and money. The robbery depicted in the video occurred yesterday morning and got the FBI involved; several hours later a U.S. Marshall and an FBI agent stopped the boy at a roadblock and took him down with a rifle, hitting him four times.
A medical examination, performed last night, revealed that the muscles in the boys arms, legs, chest and back were made up of some strange, foreign tissue. This tissue exhibited some characteristics of human muscle tissue (contracts in response to electrical impulses, etc) but was dramatically stronger. Doctors theorized that the cause of his pain was that while his muscles were exceptionally strong, his bone density remained the same, and therefore his bones were always under strain. While he had no visible signs of scarring, when observed under magnification his skin showed tiny sutures of the same material as the underlying muscle.
Derringer believed there was something unusual about the case yesterday, so put in a call to HANNIBAL, an old acquaintance of his.
The agents go to Spivey’s holding cell. There are two FBI agents there with M16s guarding him, and he is visibly sedated. They question him and confirm Derringer’s recounting. “It hurts,” he says over and over. HAROLD asks the agents to leave and tries to hypnotize the boy, to get him to recall the events of the two “lost days”. He is not able to get any more information out of him about this period, and it seems his recollection of the last seven days has been hazy as well.
HANNIBAL rents a Chrysler LeBaron, and using underground connections finds someone to disable the LOJACK system that was present in it. MALCOLM, based on a message from A-Cell, sends MASON to a “Green Box” in a U-Stor-It facility in a Knoxville industrial park. MASON disables the cameras at the facility and returns with two large camping bags containing:
A Sledgehammer;
A case of lighter fluid;
An unopened carton of Gauloises (French cigarettes not for sale in the US since 2003);
A Prybar;
A single man Battering Ram;
4 Glock 21 .45 ACP self-load pistols + 5 13 round magazines;
1 HK UMP .45 ACP Submachine gun with silencer with 7 25 round magazines;
2 Remington 870 12 gauge pump shotguns with 20" rifled deer slug barrels.;
30 rounds (6 boxes) 12 Gauge 00 Buckshot;
A small bundle of what appears to be 6 sticks of TNT taped together with a makeshift timing device and detonator;
A First Aid kit;
A bag of seven zip-tie handcuffs; and
A wad of cash, totaling $217 in assorted bills.
Left in the Green Box, among other things, was a small wooden packing crate marked “Do Not Open Under Any Circumstances” – MASON listened to this and it seemed quiet enough, but decided to heed the warning.
It is HANNIBAL's belief that the boy is hosting an alien parasite, and he contends that as he is no longer fully human he has forfeited his human rights; accordingly, it should be DG's perogative to exploit him for his super-powers. He passes this opinion up the chain to A-Cell.
H-Cell and MASON drive to Groversville in the LeBaron, while MALCOLM performs his own examination on the boy. He finds the tissue, where it was damaged by the bullets, has almost completely healed. He sends an analysis of the muscle tissue via encrypted email to A-Cell. This occupies his time until the late evening, and he drives out to Groversville himself.
All of the agents get rooms at Merle’s Shut-Eye, a small motel owned by the proprietor of Merle’s Country Bunker, the only bar in town. HANNIBAL visits this establishment while the others grab dinner and retire to bed. HANNIBAL and HECTOR share a room, while MALCOLM, MASON and HAROLD get their own rooms (MASON puts pillows in his bed and sleeps in the closet).
At 6:00 the next morning, MASON receives a knock on his door. It is HANNIBAL, who has already been drinking from his flask. He wants to head out to the Spivey house to look around. Together, they arrive at 6:30 and knock on the door. Several minutes later Spivey’s mother, Angel, answers in a housecoat. Her sister and brother-in-law are there too, sitting on the couch. “Harv Cole, U.S. Marshall’s Service, ma’am,” says HANNIBAL, flashing his badge. While HANNIBAL questions the mother, MASON goes upstairs and flips the boy’s room. HANNIBAL interrupts his questioning several times to drink in the bathroom. Loud banging and crashing can be heard from upstairs. Her husband’s funeral was yesterday, she tells him, but assures him that Billy Ray was not involved with drugs. MASON returns, having found nothing, and the agents leave to visit the home of Jane Allen, Spivey’s girlfriend.
The two agents drive down the two-lane highway to the Allen home. It’s only about two miles away, but the road travels through empty fields and wooded areas – very reclusive. They ring the doorbell and a woman in her late thirties answers.
She does not prove to be helpful: while she is not evasive in any way, she seems oddly disinterested in what’s going on. Jane isn’t here, she says. When asked where she might be, she replies “gone out, I guess.” It seems she hasn’t been home in a few days, but Mrs. Allen is not concerned. There is evidence that a man lives in the house, but he’s not around either.
“Is there a Mr. Allen?” asks HANNIBAL.
“He’s at work,” she tells them.
“Where does he work, ma’am?”
“He’s an alderman,” she says.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means. Does it have to do with trees?”
“No, he works at Town Hall.”
“It sounds medieval,” says HANNIBAL. “Is he like a Town Crier or something?”
“I don’t think he’s crying. He’s just busy lately.”
MASON flips the girl’s room too. All he notices is that the dresser drawers are open, and half empty, as if the clothes had been removed.
Upon leaving, MASON says that Mrs. Allen is on drugs.
"Really? I didn't get that from her," says HANNIBAL, as he takes a swig from his flask and staggers into the driver's seat.
At 9:30 they have an appointment to meet with the Sheriff, Dan Oakley, so they return to Merle’s Shut-Eye to meet up with the other agents.
