Page 34 of Identity Unknown
“Sunrise was at oh-six-hundred hours. So, yes, and had been for a while.”
“The sun would have made the surface of the skin warmer,” I explain. “I doubt his core temp was as high as indicated by infrared. And what time was it when the enclosure went up?”
“About a half hour later.” It’s Daniel who answers.
“You get a sense that anyone besides us has been in this park in recent memory?” Marino directs this at Tron. “Any sign that someone might have been scoping out the place in advance, for example?”
“Nothing I saw, but I was wondering the same thing when we landed here after spotting the body,” she says. “I kept thinking that whoever did this checked out the place first, did a dry run.”
“How can you be sure nobody else is here even as we speak, as big as the theme park is?” Marino then asks.
“A hundred acres with a lot of places to hide. The visibility’sterrible, and we’re in the Quiet Zone,” Tron replies. “You’re right, we can’t be sure of anything.”
“We did a recon of the main buildings but no way we could search every inch of the entire park,” Rob explains. “We didn’t find any sign that someone had been here recently. Although several times we heard something strange.”
“So did we inside the castle a few minutes ago.” Marino works his legs into the coveralls, staring through the tent’s opening as if something might be out there. “The doc thought she heard someone walking around, and both of us heard music.”
“Music?” Tron frowns. “From where?”
“I don’t know,” Marino says. “But something weird is going on.”
“When we were looking around Emerald City, we heard something in the brush close by,” Rob goes on. “Now and then we’d hear it moaning, mumbling, making eerie sounds as it followed in the woods. We couldn’t see what it was and I didn’t want to go poking around to find out.”
“Maybe a coyote or a fox?” Daniel offers. “I don’t think a bear would make the sounds we heard.”
“I can only imagine the wildlife that’s taken over this place,” Tron comments.
CHAPTER 13
The heavy rain drums the tent, thunder rumbling as Marino and I finish suiting up. We strap on belt-mounted blowers that will circulate purified air inside hoods that smell like plastic and are the yellowish green of tennis balls. The heavy rubber gloves we pull on will work well enough for my purposes.
“Truth is, we don’t know what’s out here, and normally we’d have drones patrolling,” Lucy is saying. “That’s not possible in this downpour. But our spectrum analyzers aren’t picking up any unusual signals in the noise floor.”
“All that means is nobody’s nearby with a cell phone or some other wireless device that probably wouldn’t work anyway this close to the heart of the Quiet Zone,” Marino retorts.
“You’re right about that,” Lucy admits.
He picks up the field cases, and I carry the wet cardboard box of body pouches. We step outside to loud rain splashing, lightning streaking and thunder cracking. Hurrying through wind and water, we’re careful not to slip in our ill-fitting rubber boots, the visibility poor, my face shield fogging up. Battery-powered auxiliary lighting has been set up inside the black tent, and my breath catches at the gruesome sight of him.
Sal is face up on the Yellow Brick Road, dark red blood coagulated around his head, and I’m shaken to my core. I know instantly that he was alive when dropped from the sky by a flying object we can’t identify. He has massive tissue response to his injuries, and I hope to God he wasn’t conscious at the time.
“How do you want to do this?” Marino says as we pat ourselves dry with paper towels left for us.
“We’re not going to do much here. Only what’s necessary while you take photographs,” I reply.
Our voices are muffled through the rubber speaking diaphragms in our plastic face covers. My breathing is loud, and I’m getting hot in heavy plastic. I ask for the handheld Geiger counter, battery powered, the size of an iPhone but no Wi-Fi required.
“Give me a few minutes,” I then say.
Stepping away from him, I can’t be crowded. And I need to be alone with Sal for now.
“I’ll be right here.” Marino waits near the tent’s opening, and I block him out, pretending he’s not there watching my every move.
I step closer to the body of a friend I’ve cared for half my life. Then I push away thoughts like that, telling myself now’s not the time. But I’m pained by the familiar chiseled cut of his jaw, the straight bridge of his nose, his lean but strong build and shoulder-length gray hair. I recognize the long scar on the left side of his abdomen from surgery to remove his appendix.
Also missing is the jewelry he had on when I saw him in his driveway yesterday. His smartwatch. Several inexpensive beaded bracelets. A fossilized shark’s tooth he wore as a necklace. A gold stud earring. From where I’m standing I can seethe pi sign tattoo on his inner left wrist. Taking slow breaths to steady myself, I hold down the Geiger counter’s power button until it beeps.
The software runs through a systems check on the illuminated display, the detector working normally. I slowly walk around the body, waiting for an alarm to sound, and it doesn’t. The radiation level is below the safe threshold. We won’t need a hazmat team, but that doesn’t mean the body wasn’t exposed to something else harmful.