I’m so confused. I feel like crying myself. “I thought this was about Sigma.”
“It’s more than that. It’s—”
Dad interrupts himself by slamming on the brakes. I look ahead and see the cars in front of us stopping at a checkpoint. A newly constructed guardhouse, still unpainted, sits beside the highway, and a dozen soldiers stand in front of a chain-link gate that blocks the road. The soldiers wear winter-camouflage uniforms, dappled with patches of white and gray. Each man carries a sleek, black rifle.
“Whoa,” Dad says, squinting at the guardhouse. “This wasn’t here before.”
“Is this the entrance to the Nanotechnology Institute?”
“No, we’re still five miles away. It looks like the Army beefed up security.”
I lean forward to get a better view. The soldiers in the Humvee at the front of the convoy step out of their vehicle and huddle with the soldiers at the gate. Colonel Peterson gets out of the Humvee too and shakes hands with one of the men, a tall soldier with broad shoulders and snow-white hair. This guy has three stars on his uniform, so he must be a general or something. Standing next to him, Peterson looks like a midget.
After a while several lower-ranking soldiers break out of the huddle and jog down the line of SUVs. They stop beside our car and one of them taps the driver-side window. “Mr. Armstrong?” the soldier shouts.
Dad rolls down the window. “Yes?”
“Please come with me to the Humvee, sir. General Hawke wants to have a word with you while we drive to the institute.”
Frowning, Dad points at me. “I’m with my son. Tell Hawke I’ll talk with him later.”
“Sir, the general wishes to speak to you immediately. Another soldier will drive this vehicle the rest of the way.”
Dad glares at the man. “I made an arrangement with Peterson. He said we—”
“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, sir, but Colonel Peterson isn’t the commander of this base. General Hawke is.”
For a second I think Dad’s going to curse the guy out. But instead he sighs unhappily and opens the driver-side door. He looks at me over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you when we get there.” Then he steps out of the car and walks with the soldier to the front of the convoy.
My new driver, a beefy corporal with the name “Williams” on his uniform, takes Dad’s place. He doesn’t look at me or say a word. A moment later, the soldiers at the checkpoint open the gate and the convoy moves on.
Past the checkpoint, the ravine narrows. Treeless, snow-covered slopes loom over the road. My pulse races because I’m a bit claustrophobic. I feel boxed in by the mountains. But I’m determined not to show any signs of weakness in front of Corporal Williams, so I bite the inside of my cheek and stare straight ahead.
After several minutes we come around a bend and I see a sheer wall of rock in front of us. We’re in a box canyon, bordered on three sides by high cliffs. The only way out is the way we came in. But as we approach the canyon’s dead end I see another guardhouse and a dark, round hole carved into the rock wall. It’s the entrance to a tunnel.
There are more soldiers at this checkpoint, but the gate in front of the tunnel stands wide open. General Hawke must’ve radioed ahead to let them know we were coming. The convoy rumbles into the tunnel, which goes on for several hundred yards. At the other end we emerge on a bare, flat basin, about a mile across, encircled by steep mountain ridges. Crusted with snow and ice, the ridges form a high, unbroken wall around the basin. It’s like a giant bowl with a flat, muddy bottom.
The convoy speeds down a road that crosses the basin. On the left I see a runway and a hangar. On the right are several concrete buildings surrounded by a tall fence topped with razor wire. As I looked closer at the buildings I notice something odd—there are no doors in their door frames and no glass in their windows. The buildings are hollow, open to the elements. It’s like a fake town on a movie set, full of structures that look real from a distance but are actually empty. I can’t figure it out.
The road ends on the far side of the basin, in the shadow of the high ridge. The Humvees and SUVs park in front of another concrete building that stands against the base of the ridge. This building is small, only twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, but it doesn’t seem to be hollow like the others. It has a massive steel door that looks like it could survive a direct strike from a cruise missile. As the soldiers step out of their Humvees, the door starts to roll up.
Corporal Williams shuts off our car’s engine and looks at me for the first time. “Your wheelchair’s in the back?”
I nod. Then I point at the building’s doorway. The door is all the way up, but I can’t see anything inside. It’s too dark. “Is that the Nanotechnology Institute?”
“That’s one name for it. We usually call it Pioneer Base.”
“But it’s so small.”
Williams chuckles. “You’re looking at the entrance, the top of the elevator shaft. The base is underground.”
My mouth goes dry. This is worse than the ravine. “How far down?”
“You’ll see.”
CHAPTER 6
I’m in the front row of an auditorium deep inside Pioneer Base. I kept my eyes closed during the descent in the elevator, so I don’t know how far underground I am. To stop myself from thinking about the tons of dirt and rock above me, I concentrate on the thirty people in the room. Including myself, there are twelve teenagers and eighteen parents sitting in the auditorium’s curved rows. We’re all facing an empty podium on an oval stage.
Fortunately, the rows are widely spaced, leaving enough room for wheelchairs. Of the twelve teenagers, six are partially or fully paralyzed. Three of them are worse off than I am—they can’t move at all, neither their arms nor their legs, and they’re breathing through tubes connected to mechanical ventilators. All three are boys. One is white, one is black, and one is Asian. Although they seem to have the same kind of muscular dystrophy I have—Duchenne is the most common type—they’re obviously in a more advanced stage of the disease. It’s sobering to see them strapped in their chairs, helpless and silent. As I stare at them I realize I’m looking at my own future. Unless the U.S. Army has a miracle in store, I’ll fall silent too.
The other six kids can still walk, although most of them are a little unsteady on their feet. Shannon Gibbs waves at me as her mother and father guide her to a seat in the second row. Her parents are short and plump, and they look anxious. Just behind them, in the third row, is another girl with cancer. Painfully thin, she wears a cashmere sweater and a frilly blue hat to hide her baldness. The girl’s parents, dressed in business suits, seem to be wealthier than Shannon’s but just as anxious. They’re all hoping the Army has some experimental drug that’ll cure their kids, but the secrecy is driving them crazy. They’re wondering why they had to go all the way to the Rocky Mountains just to hear about it.
Two rows farther back, a haggard mother sits next to a boy whose head is unnaturally large and deformed. His lower jaw is massive, as big as a shovel blade, and fist-size tumors bulge out of his forehead like horns. This isn’t an ordinary case of brain cancer—this is something unusual, freakishly rare. The sight of him is disturbing, and a little disorienting too. I’m usually the guy who makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable, but now I’m the one who’s squirming.