Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero Read Online Free PDF

off my scalp, into my eyes and off my chin.
    Up to the porch now, slowly . . .
    Fucking creaky porch . . .
    •   •   •
    THE CABIN—FRONT DOOR TILTED SLIGHTLY OPEN—LOOKED AS ACCESSIBLE as every trap in the world, with that black slit inviting us in. I judged the place an eight hundred square foot rectangle—
I hope it’s only one room—
built from a conglomeration of weathered wood jutting up like a beached ship on posts hammered into the tundra, to set it a foot above the grass.
    It sat thirty yards from the glassy lake
—natural water supply—
and another hundred from the shallow creek that probably swelled to monumental proportions in the spring, emptied into the Arctic Ocean, and served as a minor tributary to the Porcupine River, a major Iñupiat hunting grounds.
    The Harmons weren’t soldiers. They were gentle people who collected plants and oohed and aahed over seeds and algae. They fretted about genes, not germs.
    We made it onto the porch. We stood on opposite sides of the slightly open door. I heard a low droning inside, and realized it was a mass of flies.
    You go left,
my eyes ordered Eddie. We’ve communicated in battle situations without talking since we were young lieutenants, in Iraq War One. And even before that, at ROTC, in Massachusetts, where we met.
    Eddie’s quick glance said,
If he’s in there, he left that front door open. Step in, Marines, and BOOM!
    My hand signals told Eddie,
Ready? One . . . two . . .
    We burst in, me in the lead, Eddie taking the corners. Me processing the scene, thinking,
Nothing moving yet . . . two rooms: the bunk room and the kitchen area. Corners clear. Body one in the lower bunk. Body two on the floor. Flies. Lots of flies. Clouds of flies. That was what I saw move by the window.
    Eddie came out of the closet-sized, honey-bucket bathroom, and I smelled urine and shit from in there, unemptied buckets.
    “All clear, Uno,” he said, lowering his Mossberg, leaning against the wall in momentary relief.
    But then the flies moved again as a mass, rising off the form on the bunk, to cross the window, a fast-moving shadow, a hungry buzz, and the relief was over.
    Oh man . . .
    Eddie knelt at the lower bunk. A poster above the upper one pictured a smiling female researcher in a Woods Hole Institute sweatshirt, holding up tweezers and a Ziploc bag: REMEMBER TO FREEZE YOUR SAMPLES!!! A second poster showed a big polar bear, teeth bared, and the caption: LOOK BEFORE YOU STEP OUTSIDE!
    “Oh, Christ, One. It’s Kelley.”
    She lay—what remained of her—in a torn heap of bedding, and I had to force myself to look at the mass of muscle, liquid, and ligature where her head had been. A bare foot protruded from the shredded North Face sleeping bag. The flies were a tropism drawn to the worst kind of luck. The stuffing poked out, soaked with black blood. She’d been thrown into the wall by the blast, smearing the planking with grayish brain matter, a raisin-sized bit of discolored bone wedged between planks, and then she’d bounced off and settled. The limbs showed all the animation of a straw doll’s. A mass of strawberry-blond hair was pasted by blood to the wall. A single yellow strand glowed abruptly in a beam of sunlight coming through the window, flaring and dying as quickly as a soul departs a body.
    That lone hair got to me more than the rest of the carnage. One hair. The strand you find in a teenage girl’s brush, and it went along with the innocent items on the milk crate night table, sitting an arm’s reach from the body; a Head & Shoulders shampoo bottle, a red-banded Mickey Mouse watch, a silvery palm-sized miniature digital recorder, a half-empty pack of Juicy Fruit gum.
    “That mirror is busted over there,” I said, jerking my head toward a part of the cabin otherwise untouched by violence. Something about it stood out . . . a mirror . . . shattered . . . a mirror . . .
    “Shot up?” Eddie said.
    “No. No pellet