Chapter Text
A hand-woven rug hung between Agent Winchester and seven chairs from the Department of Defense. The eldest of the seven pointed to a black shape in the corner of the rug with his pen. "A marine brought this home from her last tour in Afghanistan, " he said, looking over his glasses, "Care to enlighten us?"
Sam folded his hands, mindful of the news cameras. "Afghani village women weave all kinds of combat vehicles into their tapestries, possibly it's a helicopter."
The old man's glasses slid to the end of his nose, and he tapped a series of black dots below the mysterious figure. "And what do you make of these?"
"I'm not a textile expert. Depending on the direction they could be shells or strafing or ground-to-air missiles." he babbled, tossing out their favorite toys like chum to circling sharks. The old man didn't bite.
"That's interesting," he said, with a vague nod, "Because they look like footprints to me."
Sam was silent, and the man continued. "Six months ago your department requested funding to send a team of scientists into an unpopulated mountain pass less than ten miles from where this rug was made. They never returned. We'd love to hear your theories."
"My department is working on extracting the team."
One of the chairs opened a case file to the black and white mugshot of Sam's brother, less polished but with the chiseled intensity of a survivalist. "The gunman you sent with them has no prior record of government service. Why choose him over thousands of other more qualified candidates?"
"I trust him."
"And you don't trust your own people?"
"Of course not. They all work for spies."
The cameramen laughed, and stopped beneath the committee's level gaze. "Why were none of the other teammates photographed?"
Sam had practiced this one while shaving in the mirror. "Without the proper security clearance, I cannot divulge details pertaining to an ongoing investigation."
"Alright. What kind of scientific observation could they possibly make in the desert?"
"I'm not at liberty to say. You would have to ask them."
The old man laid down his pen and walked across the room and covered Sam's microphone with his hand. His lips stretched over yellow teeth as if exposing a piece of his skull. "You talk a big game son. But you don't game."
Sam locked eyes with him, knowing if he didn't give up something the DoD would throttle his office with so much red tape it would take eighteen months to sign off on a roll of toilet paper. He waited until the old man was back in his chair and sipped some water and chose his half-truths carefully. "Is the committee familiar with Project Pale Fire?"
When no one answered, Sam said, "Two years ago the Russians deployed a mobile clinic that could enter combat zones via remote control and, according to my sources, far outstrips our American droid medics."
"What sources? Do you have anything concrete you can present to the committee?"
Sam shuddered. He had kept a few of the original photos on his laptop, and burned the really bad ones in his kitchen sink. News cameras zoomed in on his computer screen where two pictures of the same Russian soldier lay side by side. The one on the left was covered in burns, his eyes two broken egg yolks in his head. The other was completely restored. The time stamps between the photos were ten minutes apart.
Sam looked round as the room broke into excited whispers. "The clinic experienced engine failure during a covert mission, and Russia has yet to claim it as their own. My team was sent in to document as much of the technology as possible for the purposes of reverse engineering, since the structure is too big and in too precarious a position to be airlifted out."
The committee members wrote messages to one another on notepads, the rug and its' monstrous footsteps forgotten. "What's your next step, Agent Winchester?"
A small corner of the gunman's mugshot peeked out from the folder, and Sam massaged his throat, afraid his voice would crack. "After so many weeks of radio silence, I have to assume the first team is either captured or... I've already drawn up a proposal to dispatch a second team for intelligence gathering and the retrieval of all, if any, survivors."
A consensus was quickly reached. "The Department of Defense is happy to furnish you with any personnel you might require for this venture."
Sam smiled through the follow-up questions, failing to mention that he'd already tapped a man for the job, not that it would have mattered. None of the people in that room would last two weeks.
(*)
"Hey."
Holmes turned in his chair. A scientist leaned against the doorframe, spreadsheet trailing behind him like a security blanket, hair stuck up like dandelions on a man-shaped stone. "I'm waiting for someone Doctor..." he squinted at the nametag, "...Howard, may I help you?"
"Hey."
He said something else, but it was a bouillabaisse of American slang and engineering jargon, and Holmes noted the man wore paper slippers. The man smiled, no teeth and dark gums.
"Hey."
"I'm sorry, I can't understand you."
"It's alright, Mister Holmes," said Sam, gently prying the scientist from the doorknob, "I see you've met Doctor Howard. Research doing well?"
Howard turned his hollow gaze upward. "Hey."
"Yes, yes," said Sam, patting his shoulder soothingly, "Better get those papers to the lab."
Howard bobbed his head and puttered off, spreadsheet sliding across the carpet long after he turned the corner.
Sam had inherited his office from an ex-NASA wonk, and was continually gifted with the second-hand detritus of the International Space Station. Beneath a row of dog portraits, Holmes watched a 3-D printer sweep layers of plastic dust on the replica of a murder victim's skull. It was incomplete, but he knew the fracture patterns of a tire iron. Holmes considered telling Sam as much when he took one look at the agent's long hair and decided it would be more fun convincing Sam it had been a suicide.
Sam studied the skull, his features up-lit in green. "Amazing what technology can do. What can you tell from this model?"
Holmes didn't have to look at it a second time. "Male, late thirties, Tunisian judging by the earholes but more likely French third generation immigrant. The killer knew him well enough that the blow to the front came as a surprise, before the victim turned away and took the remaining damage across the neck."
"And the killer?"
Holmes rubbed his dry hands together and looked up, sending imaginary pawns and knights and queens across the water-stained ceiling tiles. "Now, the victim has the calcium deposits of an athlete, so the other man would have to exceptionally strong, and the tidy aggregate of the blows says he's a fast runner. It says he never allowed his victim to be out of reach."
Sam loomed over him, fingertips touching the desk. "Does it say how tall he is?"
Holmes never took his eyes off the ceiling. He was two moves away from checkmate. "I thought Americans only killed for money."
"That's not true. Some of us will do it for the look on your face."
"I'm looking at you right now, is that supposed to make me clutch my pearls?"
"Did you read my report on the Pale Fire expedition?"
"Enough to know it's fiction."
Sam sat down, the 3-D printer whirring behind him. "It's not. It's worse."
Holmes pulled out the report and stabbed an empty picture frame with his finger. "There's no record of any of the scientists you have listed here."
A soft rustling noise approached them from the hallway, and Sam ducked his head in faint embarrassment. "You must understand..."
He didn't need to finish the sentence. Scientists didn't retire here. Repositories of all the classified knowledge that got passed around on handwritten notes and then denied during press conferences, they quickly became a security risk in the civilian world, and once outdated were often sent to third world field assignments where even Depression-era technology looks like witchcraft. And the ones who didn't volunteer for the field, too frail or far gone...
Holmes followed the old woman shuffling down the hallway in her labcoat, a thick bandage not entirely concealing the third ear growing out of her wrist. "How long have you been 'volunteering' federal employees as test subjects?"
A fugitive smile lifted the corner of Sam's mouth. "That's classified."
"So you bought your team of Igors a one-way ticket to the Sandbox to clean house?"
"It's not like that. Our latest research has had...unforeseen side effects, and Pale Fire presented a real solution for the test subjects, for everybody."
"But you didn't kill a useful informant for the sake of science," said Holmes, pointing at the printer, "Why is there a plastic skull in your office?"
Sam glanced at the dog portraits while thinking of an answer. Another NASA gift, each portrait depicted a dog fired into space by the Russians to test space capsules later used by men. He'd had a running conversation with those portraits for the past three months.
Sam lifted the skull from the printer but avoided gazing into it's eye sockets, not wanting his grief boiled down to bad theater. "He was the last person to see my brother's body. But he wouldn't tell me where."
Holmes said nothing and gathered up the report to keep his hands busy, though the paper felt heavier now. "What would you have me do?"
"Just bring me his bones. He should be buried here," he said, turning away to signal the meeting was over, "He should come home."
(*)
The wind never let up in this part of the country. Holmes listened to sand sizzle against the innkeep's window, the distant houses appearing and disappearing in the white-out like an Arabian fairy tale.
Holmes rested his feet on a bloody sack, disguised as a farmhand, claiming his boss had paid him to take infected chickens out to the desert to be burned. Whenever locals asked what the chickens had, he began coughing violently, and they found excuses to be elsewhere.
The innkeep patted him on the shoulder. "You sleeping here tonight?"
In truth Sam had supplied him with little cash and a Pashto dictionary so outdated Holmes had fed it to his donkey, and he wondered if the Department of Defense was that strapped for resources or if they didn't expect him to come home alive. For answer, two stealth bombers cut across the sky, and finishing his tea he asked the innkeep how much a motorbike sold for and rode off into the desert.
The storm was even worse further out. By the time he came within a mile of the team's last known coordinates he could barely see his hand in front of his face, and he walked the bike with his head bowed into the wind. He encountered neither road nor track nor any other sign of life.
Thrusting his hand into the sack, he ruminated on the underutilization of bees for sniffing out criminals, their incalculable skill for memorizing a new scent and then seeking it out en masse. He wondered what kind of honey a prison would produce. Or a morgue. He'd have to experiment when he got home.
The first chicken opened under his thumbs, the cylinder of a microscope secreted within. He'd hated to kill them, but border guards were no joke and he couldn't operate without a lab, and using his cloak as a makeshift tent he screwed bloody parts together and began taking soil samples. Washington has a signature mix of loam and plastic and coffee found nowhere else, to the trained eyed at least, and after many painstaking hours he was able to estimate the direction the team had taken.
The landscape changed, flat lakebed giving way to scrubland and eventually to a series of caves that pockmarked the mountains, some bottomless, some only a waist-deep, giving the overall impression that Holmes was walking across a giant bath sponge. It was by one of these caves that he noticed a clump of mud a foot off the ground, as if someone had scraped their boot on the side of the wall before entering. He clicked on his flashlight and waved it around inside.
"Hello?"
A shot struck the ground between his feet. He pulled his canteen from an inner pocket and shook it invitingly. "I've got apple juice. I had to carry it a long way, I wait any longer I'll have to toss it."
The silence stretched, and eventually Holmes got a whispered reply and ducked his head past the lip of the cave. He walked in total darkness, the flashlight exposing wet rock like a circle cut out of black paper until he lit upon the other man's eyes.
Sherlock held up his hands. "I'm unarmed."
Dean Winchester faced the entrance, assault rifle pushed into his hip, seated against a row of steel water drums the Afghani rebels had cached in preparation for the next Russian invasion. His right leg was bandaged and splinted with a length of driftwood. In the corner, a scarecrow had been fashioned out of old clothes with a charcoal face drawn on the wall above the collar. Holmes wondered if he'd interrupted something.
"What happened to your leg?"
Dean adjusted the grip on his gun, though clearly relieved to hear English again. "I fell."
"You fell?"
"I was pushed."
Holmes nodded and passed him the canteen. He would have offered some small fraction of the pharmacy he had sewn into his jacket, but he wanted the man coherent for questioning. "Your brother sent me. Someone reported you dead."
Dean took a small sip, tested his stomach, then went for more. "Dead how?"
"They found your body in the desert not far from here."
"Was I naked?"
Holmes narrowed his eyes, but Dean shook his head. "Never mind. Get me back to town and I can call in a ride to the embassy."
Holmes glanced at the barrel of the gun. "I was ordered to bring back all survivors. You had four others in your care."
Dean's lip curled, and Holmes guessed where he'd gotten the injury. He turned to the scarecrow instead. "Who's your friend?"
"It helps me think."
"It?"
He waited for Dean to lash out or drop his eyes in embarrassment. But to him the scarecrow was as equally necessary as the gun, perhaps more so. "Him."
Holmes nodded. "Did 'he' recommend you sleep in a cave when there's a clinic within crawling distance?"
"Is that what they told you?" said Dean, his voice flat, "Is that what they've been telling everyone?"
Dean tipped back his head and began to laugh at his own personal joke. It was a nice laugh, and utterly chilled Holmes to the marrow. Dropping the gun, Dean propped up his elbow and leaned his cheek against the back of his hand, closing his eyes and talking to someone other than Holmes.
"I'm so tired. We can't stay here."
Holmes pressed Dean's hand to drink more, and he did.
"You've been missing for six months."
"I told them they wouldn't find a cure," said Dean, wiping his chin, "They could barely walk on two legs by the time we got there..."
'They' must have been the scientists. Dean trailed off, listening to some inner dialogue as though the hand he leaned against were a telephone, and started talking again in fits.
"No one could read the machine's instructions. I don't think it's even a real language. We did all kinds of trials with the equipment we recognized, but they just got sicker and then we found that tape recording..."
Sherlock sat on his haunches, rubbing his head. The pills in his jacket whispered relief, but they would have to wait.
"They kept playing it over and over again. This sound. Thum. Thum. And then screaming. Thum Thum..."
"I told them to turn it off, but they'd stopped talking to me by then. They wanted to see what else that thing could do..."
"I cut the engine while they were sleeping. Or whatever they do up in that room. They were so mad when I didn't fix it, their hands..."
Dean spread out his fingers, looking down as if to confirm he still had them. "They can't operate anything anymore. They can't even fit through the hatchway. They're too screwed up."
His eyes rested on the scarecrow, as if it had been about to speak before his gaze froze it in place. Holmes imagined Sam Winchester in his dreary Washington office, equally hobbled by pain and sleeplessness, filling in the gaps of this conversation with his dog portraits.
Holmes dug in. "How do I get inside the machine?"
Dean noticed him again. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
Dean pointed the gun over Holmes' head, but this time he curled in to make himself small. For a moment his hand flicked out to the scarecrow protectively. "He's out there. I can hear him at night."
Holmes strained his ears, and indeed he caught a low moan that rose and fell at intervals, too regular to be an echo from a neighboring cave. After a while it stopped and Dean lowered his gun and was himself again.
"I can help you get home," said Holmes carefully, "But a lot of important people with important warrants for your arrest are banking on photos of whatever miracle technology is hiding out there."
Dean smirked. "I thought I was a dead man. Dead men don't serve time."
"That's just paperwork. That's one number changed," said Holmes, holding his hands as if typing at a keyboard, "Clickety clack, bring the man back."
Holmes watched a progression of ugly ideas on Dean's face, then breathed out as Dean replaced his gun in his side holster. "They don't move much during the day. You get one hour in there to take pictures, then we're out. You do anything to compromise this plan, we will a) find you and b) fuck up your shit."
"This isn't your brother," said Holmes disgustedly, standing up and breaking the scarecrow apart with one kick, "Your brother's thousands of miles away. No one else is coming to help you."
Dean shook his head without taking his eyes off Holmes. "You're wrong."
And faster than Holmes would have credited him for, Dean touched him in five different places, lightly, as it pulling off pocket lint from his shoulders and headscarf, and suddenly Holmes kicked himself for not recognizing the innkeep for an informant. Dean swelled with pride. Five bugs, each no bigger than a pinhead but capable of locating a penny flipped into the Grand Canyon, lay in the palm of his hand.
He brushed his hands together. "Don't fuck with my little brother."
(*)
The entrance to the machine was impossible to tell apart from the neighboring caves unless you pressed your hand to it. It was like staring at the bottom of a birdbath through your own reflection, the steel wall projecting an image of craggy blonde stone three inches above the surface, and despite the summer heat was cool to the touch.
Sherlock bent down to examine the bottom. Thick metal stumps raised the machine off the ground. "What are those?"
Dean shifted on his bad leg. "What's what?"
"Those things on the bottom."
"Probably to keep the floor from rotting out during flood season."
"Not those," said Sherlock, reaching out to a series of holes in the dirt, "The marks they made."
Dean shaded his eyes against the wind. The dust storm was too thick to see more than a few feet in any direction, and Sherlock did not care to know how big it was. As big as a house? As big as a mountain? With something that size and that good at camouflage, neither man wanted to say the word 'footprints', as if that might give the machine ideas.
Sherlock stood up and brushed his hands on his slacks. "I don't see a way in."
"It's up there." said Dean, pointing at a spot thirty feet up.
Sherlock felt around blindly and discovered a handhold cut into the wall, two by two inches. "Our shoes won't fit in there."
Dean was already seated and unlacing his boots. "I know."
"What kind of clinic puts a front door that high off the ground?"
Dean said nothing and began to climb.
Whoever designed the machine had had long legs and never heard of guardrails, and Sherlock spent long moments on each step trying to keep his balance as his shoes dangled from his belt. Despite a bum leg, Dean has tremendous upper body strength and managed the journey with the speed and agility of a professional circus rigger, hopping from one handhold to the next without breaking a sweat. Sherlock followed slowly after. The edges dug into the soft flesh of his feet, and he did not look forward to the return descent.
Eventually they reached a hatchway that gave under pressure, and found themselves in a darkened staging area with crates and folding tables pushed against the wall. A low hum vibrated through the floor just below human hearing, like elephants calling to one another, and made the candy wrappers on the floor shiver. Sherlock shined his flashlight on the crates. All of them were stamped with Soviet insignia.
"The file said Russia dropped this two years ago," said Sherlock, running his thumb through the dust, "Does any of this look two years old to you?"
"Does any of this look Russian to you?" asked Dean, rapping against a wall with his knuckles, "I spent days going through this place, trying to take it apart, and you know what I didn't find? Wires. Here, lemme show you."
He dug between two seams in the wall, fingernails as hard as flat-head screwdrivers, and lifted away a metal plate to reveal the source of the hum. Sherlock shone the light on it for several seconds, then turned away. "It's a thermoelectric engine."
"A what?"
Sherlock pinched his nose, fighting the headache. "We're in a desert. Probably the entire structure was skinned with photovoltaic cells to capture sunlight and funnel the energy through a hydrogen core, meaning it's solid state and doesn't require wires for the power supply. Probably."
Dean shaped his mouth around a dirty word, but thought better of it. "Engines aren't that quiet."
Sherlock passed the light around and picked up a candy wrapper. The expiration date was twenty years old. "This one is."
Dean snatched the wrapper out his hand and threw it aside. "Don't you have pictures to take?"
Much like the outside, the machine's designer had never heard of stairs, and getting from one floor to the next required an excruciating amount of climbing, made worse by the lack of windows and having to carry a flashlight between their teeth. Fortunately the first room they came to appeared to the be the much-hailed clinic, though Dean hung back and let Sherlock enter first.
"We should look at that leg."
Dean shook his head. "I'm good here."
"That cave was filthy, you could have an infection."
Dean stared ahead. The room was empty save for a reclining metal chair bolted into the floor with a rusty drain pan attached to it and a plastic membrane covering it like a high-tech umbrella. Sherlock hesitated as well, but his curiosity far, far outweighed his fear, and the need to know pulled him into the room like an unholy riptide.
Sherlock looked everywhere but could not find a control panel. "Is this it?"
"This is it."
"But there's nothing to take pictures of," said Sherlock, checking to see if any equipment had been torn out of the walls, "Have you tried turning it on?"
Dean gave him a small, nasty smile. "You should try it on yourself."
Sherlock stopped in his tracks, ignoring Dean's sarcasm. "You're absolutely right."
The chair smelled clean, like sawdust kept in a dry shed. Closer examination of the membrane showed some advanced circuitry, but in patterns Sherlock had never seen before, and when he put his ear to it he heard the faint whir of cellular-level gearage. The hum was stronger here, wobbling behind his eyes and promising the return of his headache. Would the chair transform him as it had done the scientists? Or, like the bugs secreted onto him by the innkeep, would it plant something else in him, the headache born of lust for scientific conquest transformed into a new creature rising out of the top of his head like a periscope?
Sherlock pulled out his pocket knife. "Got a light?"
"I don't smoke."
"Oh well, let's hope this thing fixes tetanus then too." said Sherlock, as he cut a red light across his palm.
A light on the top corner changed colors as he lay back in the chair, trying to get comfortable. For a few seconds nothing happened, and Dean watched from the shadows with arms crossed and eyelids drooping. All that climbing had clearly taken its' toll.
"You should sit down."
Dean blinked hard and stood up a little straighter. "I'm fine."
"When was the last time you rested more than a couple of hours at a time? Days? Weeks?" Sherlock was the last person to dismiss crank theories, but Dean's little speech in the cave had unsettled him, and he couldn't let one sleep-deprived soldier's paranoid hallucinations bleed into the investigation.
Dean pointed at the chair. "It's about to start."
A sensor chimed within the membrane, a red line of light sweeping over his body, and then the pads beneath him ballooned upward as if inhaling, and Sherlock was sucked into the chair so hard that he could barely lift his head much less his injured hand. He stared at the rusty drain pan inches from his chin, and finally his eyes settled on the second hand on his watch. How long would a cut take to repair? A lost finger? A gouged eye?
Sherlock looked up. "Does it always do this?"
"You'll feel a pinch."
The red line scanned his uninjured hand for reference, and then Sherlock yelped, something pressing against the cut in his other hand like a hot iron. A fine rain of cellulose streamed from the membrane, red at first and then flesh-colored as layers of his hand were restored. Dean's eyes burned with intent, as if Sherlock might burst into a cloud of flesh and blood any second, and was disappointed when he didn't.
The chair powered down. Sherlock checked his watch (20 seconds) and flexed the skin back and forth beneath his flashlight, but there was no scar. There was no numbness. The cut had never been there.
"That was amazing."
Dean scratched his cheek. "Yeah."
Sherlock stood up. The clinic was not very big, perhaps a hundred square feet, so what was the rest of the building for? "Tell me where the scientists are."
Dean shook his head, and Sherlock balled up his fists, wishing John were here to step between them. "You can't keep something this important from the world."
"You think we're the first to find this place?" asked Dean, jabbing a thumb behind him toward the staging area, "You know what I think?"
"I already know what you think. You think other spies came and left and buried the reports inside of other reports because you're all a bunch of superstitious spooks who read one too many issues of Martian Manhunter."
"It's not a clinic. Clinics have..." said Dean, lost for words, "More to it."
"More what?"
But he understood Dean's point. He tried imagining the room full of people, moving about with purpose as they tended to their patients, but the patients were impossibly tall and the doctors were climbing the walls like spiders.
"Books, trash cans, I can't even find a pipe for tap water in this machine," said Dean, "You ever heard of a place this big that doesn't run water? What do they drink? How do they wash? Do they even have water where they come from?"
"Who's they?"
Dean bit his lip and Sherlock's suspicions of paranoia were confirmed. "We need to leave." said Dean.
"I won't."
Dean put his hand on his hip, right next to his holster, but Sherlock ignored the hint. "If you don't let me get word of this back home, I will kill you."
Dean studied him. He knew which death threats to take seriously. "Why kill me?"
"Because tens of thousands of people are lying in hospitals right now, burned, crushed, beyond help, and if you stand in the way of the only thing that will make them whole again," he said, showing his teeth, "Then your life is forfeit."
Dean was about to retort, when something slithered on the upper landing. Sherlock held a finger to his lips. The sound came again, and then changed direction. "What's upstairs?"
Dean unclipped his gun. "The navigation room."
"You think the scientists are there?"
"Doubt it," said Dean, checking the clip and then snapping it back in place, "Let's go check, if you're done here."
"I thought you wanted to leave."
Dean listened to the shadows, but whether he heard an intruder or the long-distance phone call from his brother's scarecrow, Sherlock was not privy to it. "I've got unfinished business."
(*)
TO BE CONTINUED