Session 11: Convergence

The investigators arrive at Merle’s Shut-Eye at the same time as the Sheriff. They find HAROLD, face bloodied, leaning against the wall in the hallway outside Adams’ room.

“Good lord,” says the Sheriff. “Who did this to you?”

“I fell,” mumbles HAROLD.

HANNIBAL steps in. “Sorry, Sheriff, we have a situation here that’s related to the interstate drug ring, and we’ll be conducting this investigation ourselves.”

Sheriff Oakley, who would rather not be involved, concedes and departs the scene.

The agents enter the room. The body remains in the bathtub, but all the water has drained, and the drain itself has been smashed open.

“I think it went up my nose,” offers HAROLD. He voluntarily relinquishes his sidearm, and MASON escorts him to Knoxville to submit to examination by MALCOLM. They take MASON’s rental car, which still has LOJACK enabled, and HANNIBAL notes the vehicle’s VIN number.

HANNIBAL and HECTOR ask at the front desk which room Jane Allen is staying in. There is no indication of a Jane Allen in the motel, but Scott Adams did reserve two rooms. The other one is two doors down from his room. HECTOR goes around outside to make sure she doesn’t flee through the window. HANNIBAL knocks at the door. After a moment, he sees an eye appear in the peephole.

“Ms Allen,” he says. “U.S. Marshall. Please open up. I need to speak with you.”

“Where’s Scott?” she says.

“He’s run into a bit of trouble.”

The deadbolt clicks open, but the door remains closed.

“Please open the door, ma’am.”

After a moment the door opens, and HANNIBAL sees a young girl, perhaps 17 years old, who is visibly pregnant. She looks to be full-term, or near enough. The room is littered with wrappers from the vending machine down the hall.

“Do you have anything to eat?” she asks. “Scott was bringing me food, but he hasn’t been here in two days.”

“We’ll get you something to eat,” says HANNIBAL. “You’re pregnant. Is Billy Ray Spivey the father?”

“Yes… I mean I think so…”

“Pregnancy seems to be progressing rather fast?”

“Maybe… I guess I must not have known I was pregnant. I’m really hungry.”

HANNIBAL explains that she will be taken to Knoxville, where a doctor is waiting to take care of her.

“Please, don’t tell my parents,” she says.

“I spoke with your mother today,” says HANNIBAL. “She’s very worried,” he lies. “Don’t worry, I will tell her that you are safe and are being taken care of.”

HANNIBAL casually walks to the window, pulls the curtain aside, and with a look acknowledges HECTOR and lets him know that everything is fine. He calls MASON and tells him to turn around. “We’ve got another one,” he says.

MASON collects Jane Allen, and HECTOR goes about his forensic analysis of Scott Adam’s room. They call MALCOLM, who dispatches a van to collect the body.

MALCOLM tests Jane Allen and the body of Scott Adams with his solution. He also tests himself, as a control, and is surprised to find he too tests positive. After much consideration, he orders a quarantine on the town of Groversville, and the surrounding countryside. The CDCP springs into action, dispatching dozens of workers to the town to test and isolate affected residents.

MALCOLM performs an MRI on HAROLD, and detects a lump past his nasal cavity. He sedates HAROLD and feeds an endoscope down his nose while observing on a display monitor. He briefly sees a strange, whitish mass in the passage, but it retreats farther down away from the light of the camera.

[Meta-game moment:
Tony: Stop! You’re forcing it farther down!]

The MRI now shows the mass in his chest cavity. With the aid of a more experienced surgeon, he opens up HAROLD’s chest and reaches in with a pair of forceps to remove the lump. He meets with some resistance, and then there is a ‘ping’ as the end of the forceps are snapped off.

Now desperate, he uses an endovascular cooling system to lower HAROLD’s body temperature to 33 degrees C (91.4 degrees F), suspecting that the foreign tissue may be prone to colder temperatures. He performs the same procedure on Jane Allen.

HANNIBAL retires to Merle’s Country Bunker, and begins to drink himself into oblivion. Meanwhile, HECTOR awaits the arrival of the meat wagon, and MASON’s return. When MASON finally arrives (at around 9:00pm) he has with him four spray bottles of leucopararosaniline solution. They head to the Country Bunker to speak with HANNIBAL, spraying bar patrons they meet on the way. Everyone turns up purple, including MASON and HECTOR themselves.

Inside the bar, they continue this test. Everyone is purple to varying degrees, the residents of the town more so than the visitors. The only one who tests negative is HANNIBAL, who, upon consideration, can’t recall eating or drinking anything in town except for scotch (straight, no ice) and Chex Mix.

The CDCP workers begin to arrive about an hour later, and HANNIBAL suggests that they visit old Bob Gum, and look into the lights he claims to have seen in the sky. When they arrive they find him in his pajamas and nursing a nightcap.

“Hey, folks, didn’t expect to see you again tonight. Can I offer you a drink?”

“Hi Bob, we need you to take us to see those lights you saw – remember?

“Sure thing. Honey, the FBI needs my help again!” he yells back into the farmhouse. “I’ll drive.”

Agents HECTOR, HANNIBAL and MASON climb into Bob Gum’s truck. He drives them across his property and up a grassy hill.

“This is where I usually seen ‘em,” he says. “Up there, in the sky.”

The agents wait a few minutes, and sure enough, several multi-colored clusters of light appear at various points in the night sky. They flitter around and then start to head east at a high rate of speed.

“After them, Bob!” yells HANNIBAL.

Bob takes the truck off the road, driving it across uncultivated fields and finally up a fire road to a ridge that descends to a low valley. The lights descend into the valley and then vanish.

“What’s down there,” asks MASON.

“Is it the home of any of these people?” asks HANNIBAL, citing the names at the bottom of the list from Scott Adams’ computer.

“Allen, Barn, Thomas…” he reads. “Nope, them’s the aldermen. They would be at town hall. There’s nothin’ down this valley but the old Anderson place. And it burned down years ago… All’s left is the barn.”

HANNIBAL orders Bob Gum to stay here, while they go down to investigate on foot.

“You know these drug types, they can be desperate. Remember that movie? It’s just like that.”

“I DO remember that movie,” says Bob Gum breathlessly. He climbs into the bed of his truck with his flask, and watches the darkness.

The agents sneak down the valley to the barn. Nearby is the burned out foundation of a house. The barn is silent. After some deliberation, they decide the safest thing would be to simply blow up the barn with the dynamite that MASON collected from the Green Box.

HANNIBAL doesn’t trust the old timing device on the dynamite, so removes it and twists the fuses together. The barn doors are closed, but there are open hay doors above them. There are no signs of UFOs in the vicinity, so they reason that they must have entered the barn through these doors. HANNIBAL sneaks up to the barn, lights the fuse, and hurls the explosives into the open doors above. He turns to run.

The barn explodes in a blazing flash, and a hunk of wood knocks HANNIBAL to the ground. Back in the pickup truck, Bob Gum spews a stream of scotch out of his nose.

The agents go to investigate the ruin of the barn. The walls of the barn blew out sideways, causing the roof to collapse into the shallow crater left by the dynamite. Wooden slats are scattered everywhere, along with large quantities of a hard, opaque plastic-like resin. The agents reason that this was coating the inside of the barn to prevent any light or sound from escaping. HECTOR heads back to the truck to pick up his forensics kit.

Suddenly, in the field beyond the barn, a bright spotlight blinks on and points at the agents. The light appears to be mounted on a black helicopter. A man in a long coat steps onto the field, flanked by six heavily armed men, like the private “security contractors” employed by the military, with no distinguishing markings on their black uniforms.

“My, my,” says the man in the coat. “What have you done with my barn?”

MASON draws his sidearm and points it at the newcomers. “Drop your weapons!” he yells.

The man laughs. “Look at you. How old are you? You definitely look a little… green around the gills. Put down your gun before you hurt yourself.”

“Your barn?” says HANNIBAL. He surreptitiously opens his cell phone in his pocket and auto-dials HECTOR. He shines his feeble flashlight at the man in the coat, and flashes his badge with the other hand. “This is our jurisdiction. Who are you to tell us to drop our weapons? Let’s see some identification.”

“No, I don’t think I’ll give you any. It’s none of your concern in any case. Run along and we’ll pretend this never happened.” He smiles, revealing three gold teeth. He is older, they can esee, with his dark hair streaked with white.

MASON refuses to drop his weapon. Finally the man sighs and says to his men: “Kill them.”

HANNIBAL leaps into the rubble of the barn for cover. The men open fire, striking MASON, who also crawls into the wreckage. HECTOR, who started back for the barn as soon as the spotlight appeared, takes some pot-shots at the man with the gold teeth from the darkness, and the security agents spray bullets into the field in his direction. The mysterious leader of the group examines the ruin of the barn for a moment, and evidently deciding there is nothing left to recover, orders the men back into the helicopter. It departs, leaving the agents alone.

HANNIBAL performs first aid on MASON, who has sustained a serious injury, and manages to stabilize him. They help him back to the truck.

“Those were some serious drug dealers. Colombians – they had a helicopter,” HANNIBAL tells Bob Gum.

“How did the barn blow up?” asks Gum.

“Propane leak, I guess.”

HANNIBAL believes something is up at town hall, and wants to pay a visit. They move past CDCP workers in town, who are shuffling people to and from the high school gym, and arrive at town hall. The front door is closed but unlocked. The lobby is darkened, but a light is visible under the double doors to the conference room. The agents draw their weapons and burst in.

On the floor is a mass of the strange tissue matter. Jutting out from it at obscene angles are the heads, arms and legs of the various aldermen. It shudders occasionally (perhaps in the onset of some form of rigor mortis) but is otherwise inanimate.

“It will be no good if the CDCP finds this,” suggests HANNIBAL. He goes about trying to overload a power circuit to start a fire; meanwhile, HECTOR goes outside and douses the wooden structure with gasoline and then lights it. HANNIBAL smells smoke and exits.

“We’ll write it up as an accident,” says HECTOR. “Doesn’t matter so much that it looks like one.”

Following the demolition of the barn, the leucopararosaniline tests beings conducted by the CDCP agents produce fewer and fewer positive results until, about two hours later, they turn up no positives at all. Certain people in the town (coincidentally, among them are the citizens who reported “lost time”) experience mysterious organ failures, in some cases fatal.

Back in Knoxville, MALCOLM performs the surgery to remove the lump from HAROLD. By now, it is completely inert. The assisting surgeon classifies it as a benign tumor. Due to a technical mishap involving the endovascular cooling system, HAROLD sustains kidney failure on one of his kidneys, which they are forced to remove. However, he appears to not be suffering of brain damage.

Billy Ray Spivey develops a high fever that the doctors are unable to break, and within hours he is dead. Jane Allen survives, but her unborn baby does not. She suffers a miscarriage moments after the barn is destroyed.

The official report of the CDC (written chiefly by MALCOLM) describes a localized outbreak of SARS that was providentially detected early and contained; the mortality rate in Groversville (<10%) is consistent with an outbreak of this pathogen.