“What the hell is that?” Perkins shouted.
“It’s an AI-assisted wheelchair.” She snapped her fingers. The chair skittered around, located her and scurried over to the helicopter. She didn’t care what her mother said, it was creepy as hell. The wheelchair was the bleeding edge of robotics, funded by her stepfather’s billions of dollars and gifted to her by her mother. The damn thing was full of glitches but was light-years ahead of anything that the VA would provide for Lain. She couldn’t blame the soldiers for staring at it, but since she was in a hospital gown, chances were good that she was going to flash anyone standing around when she shifted from the helicopter to the chair.
“This isn’t a peep show. Go do your fucking job and let me get decent.”
Lieutenant Perkins’ eyes went wide and he turned away, barking orders.
“Prepare to load.” She waited for the swing bar to extend and lock. The wheelchair took so long to process the command she thought its operating system had crashed again. She checked its screen and realized that it hadn’t heard her command over the background noise. “Prepare to load.”
The gown covered the scars where her womb used to be, leaving her knees and calves exposed. While her legs were useless, her accident had been recent enough that they still looked normal. She dreaded the day that all she had were withered sticks. The chair’s trainer had made the mistake of telling her that once her legs atrophied, swinging her body into the chair would get simpler. She’d given him a black eye. A new, more diplomatic trainer was supposed to start next week; unfortunately, that left her without a personal aide.
Perkins peeked to see if she was in the chair and caught her lifting her useless legs into place.
“Get me some clothes,” she snapped. “After I’m decent, I’ll look at these extraterrestrial life forms.”
The Black Hawk crew provided her with a flight suit to wear. She also secured a pair of binoculars, a two-way radio, and a sidearm complete with a spare magazine. (The pistol proved that her psych evaluation had not been checked prior to her kidnapping, as she’d been flagged as suicidal. Not surprising, as everything she ever dreamed had been blasted out of orbit along with most of the US space program.)
She needed two female privates to act as aides since “bathroom” on the front line was a portajohn. Her wheelchair was clever, but not designed with that limited space in mind. She hated having to let people do what she been able to do for herself since being a toddler. It made her feel weak and helpless and useless.
Once she was dressed, she chased the privates away and tracked down Lieutenant Perkins. “Where are these alien life forms that you found?”
“We put it in a cooler.” He started to walk.
“The specimen is dead then?” She followed, trying not to notice how her chair was startling the soldiers as it scurried behind Perkins.
Obviously it bothered the officer as he tried to walk sideways. “Yes, it was killed about half a mile from the demarcation line.” He pointed toward the houses clustered together beyond the highway’s right of way.
Killing it was the safest thing to do since even small rodents could bite through thick leather and carried everything from fleas to rabies. It was vastly annoying that she’d been dragged all this distance to look at a dead animal. “Did you at least put it in plastic before putting it on ice?”
Perkins looked confused. “Ice?”
“You have ice in the cooler?”
“Oh! Ice! No!” He stopped in front of a forty-foot, refrigerated shipping container. “We just put it in here.”
“Oh.” She thought he meant the type of cooler you took on picnics. “Oh!” He’d swung open the door and all her annoyance was blasted away. “Oh! A dinosaur! It has the feet and forelegs of a dromaeosauridae but it doesn’t have any feathers.” It was a beautiful jewel green with streaks of brilliant yellow that probably acted as camouflage within the forest. There were touches of jewel blue round its eyes and toes. There was a round bullet hole in its skull but no exit wound. “Dear God, why did you kill it?”
“It ate two Rottweilers, went through a picture window, and tried to batter down a bedroom door to get to the homeowner. He shot it with his deer rifle.”
“The world needs a living dinosaur more than it needs another redneck Pittsburgher.”
“Pittsburghers are suddenly in rare supply themselves.” Lieutenant Perkins didn’t seem to realize what he said. “We’ve picked out a dozen similar animals using satellites.”
“There are more? Still alive?” Life suddenly seemed a lot more interesting.
“Yes. There are two more of these at Monroeville Mall. There’s a herd of something loose in the North Hills. Elk or moose or something.”
“Mammals?” She threw a glance over her shoulder at the forest.
The trees were taller than coast redwoods, with the bulk and branch structure similar to sequoias, but appeared to be deciduous, which would make them hardwoods. Giant sequoias were the fastest growing trees in the world, but even they only grew between a foot to two feet a year. Physically it was impossible that the trees had grown overnight. It meant that improbable as it might seem, they would have had to arrive—branch, root and soil—from another world.
The forest was showing no signs of distress, so the environment of the planet the trees were from was exact to Earth’s. Nearly recognizable dinosaurs, mammals and deciduous forest indicated a nearly identical evolution path. It suggested that they were dealing with a parallel universe.
The military would be worried about the dinosaurs, but the real damage could come from anything. Rats had decimated the entire ecosystem of Easter Island, wiping out a complete forest and a dozen species of birds. Twelve wild rabbits released in Australia had multiplied to millions within decades and led to the extinction of countless native plants. Certain algae caused red tides. One nearly microscopic organism produced toxins that accumulated in shellfish and could cause a paralytic poisoning that lead to death.
She aimed her chair for the abrupt end of the highway. “I need to take samples and build a comprehensive profile of the ecosystem. We need to find out if the alien flora and fauna can thrive here. I suggest that until we know otherwise we treat it as a biological hazard and start decontamination procedures on anyone and anything coming out of the area.”
Based on what she was told, the boundary between the two ecosystems was over a hundred and fifty miles. They were upwind of New York City. All streams and rivers in the area fed into the Ohio River. By volume, the Ohio was the largest tributary of the Mississippi River and its drainage basin included fourteen states. Containment was impossible. They could be on the cusp of ecological disaster.
Perkins followed as if tethered to the back of her chair. “What are you going to need?”
Use of my legs back!
She bit down on the comment. Precious time had been taken up dealing with her crippled body. If she wasn’t stuck in her hated wheelchair, she would already be in a hazmat suit and gathering samples. As it was, she would need to waste even more time trying to protect the hydraulics on her wheelchair from contamination. She couldn’t risk taking a biohazard back to the hospital.
She gasped as she remembered the incoming Bradley troop carriers with their tank treads. If the military sent the vehicles into the forest to crawl through the rich moldering debris, organic matter would be embedded into the continuous tracks. If she didn’t arrange some way to sterilize the Bradleys before they were loaded back onto the C-17s, they would transfer foreign bacteria, spores, mold, seeds, and insects around the world.