Project Elfhome Read online

  “Oh, the joys of being famous,” she murmured. Her father had been an astronaut, host of a popular science television series and murdered when she was young. Her stepfather was impossibly rich, powerful and notoriously reclusive. Between the two, she’d grown up in the media spotlight but that was standing on two sound legs. Now the stark brilliance was too intense; it laid too much of her body and soul bare for public inspection.

  Stripped of privacy, she wrapped herself in the thorns of power instead. “Who is the motherfucker in charge of this mess?”

  That checked the crowd that had been gathering. Only one officer kept coming in the cautious half-crouch people used around helicopters. He was annoyingly tall, wide shouldered, and looked like he should still be in college, getting drunk and planning pledge hazing at a frat house. He was in army fatigues with a Pennsylvania Army National Guard badge on his sleeve.

  “Ms. Shenske, I’m Lieutenant Perkins. I’m Major General Crocker’s aide-de-camp.” He put out his hand for a handshake. Considering the wave of army forces slowly following Lain in Bradleys, the National Guard was unlikely to be in charge for much longer.

  “So you’re the asshole’s left butt cheek—congratulations. It’s Colonel Shenske. Some schmucks yanked me out of the hospital without a stitch of clothing. I need pants, shirt, socks, shoes, a coat and a blanket. And I want it now. I’m not going to sit around with my ass bare to this wind because you have your head up your ass. Get it for me, or I don’t care who the fuck you are, I’ll have your ass blistered for this.”

  Lieutenant Perkins snapped to attention and saluted. “I—I didn’t realize—yes, ma’am, I’ll have a set of clothes pulled together immediately.”

  “And if you expect me to be here at this camp for the duration, you better realize that I can’t so much as piss by myself. You have at best one hour before this becomes a very real issue. I’ll warn you now, if I end up soiling myself because some motherfucker thought up the smart idea to jerk me out of a hospital, heads will roll.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now tell me—what the fuck is going on?”

  “At zero three hundred hours, all contact with Pittsburgh was lost. Satellite imagery confirms that a perfect circle of forest has…” Lieutenant Perkins paused as he ran out of military-speak to explain. “Well—it’s here and Pittsburgh isn’t. Governor requested a declaration of National Emergency at zero four hundred hours. Unidentified life forms have led us to believe the forest is extraterrestrial in nature.”

  Her heart skipped at “extraterrestrial” but she clamped down on the jolt of emotions with steel-cold logic. There had to be some reasonable normal explanation—although she couldn’t even begin to guess at it.

  As Lieutenant Perkins brought her up to speed, a knot of soldiers had lifted her hated wheelchair up and off the helicopter. They set the cube of metal down just beyond the spinning blades of the Black Hawk and stood eyeing it in confusion.

  “It’s not that complicated,” she shouted. “Just hit the frigging power button and step back!”

  One of them figured out the red button was the power button and there was a sudden scramble backwards as the chair unfolded its eight spidery legs.

  “Hold your fire!” Lain shouted as half the soldiers whipped up their weapons and took aim on her wheelchair. “Hold your fire! God-damn stupid idiots.”

  “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.

  She growled in frustration. Her chair would have to wait. Someone else would have to take the samples while she set up decontamination procedures.

  * * *

  The limousine arrived before the Bradleys. It glided like a black shark through the chaos that was the military camp at the end of the highway. She paused to watch it come. Despite the black tinted windows, she somehow knew that it carried someone she didn’t like. Someone that was going to make her life hell.

  The limo did not fail to deliver on her expectations. The back door opened and an impossibly handsome man got out as if he owned the highway, the sky and the sun. It was her stepbrother, Yves, whom she unaffectionately nicknamed Crown Prince Kiss Butt. Yves was a testament to her stepfather’s power; he was strictly a civilian with no useful ability except as a spy for his father. Yet, here he was, passing through all the various military blockades to arrive like royalty.

  It surprised her that the forest drew Yves like a magnet. He was a creature of the city; his idea of “country” was his father’s mansion on the Palisades outside of New York City. On weekends he could barely be stirred from the indoor pool, shimmering with reflected light.

  She locked down the urge to use his distraction to run and hide. She wasn’t a grieving ten-year-old anymore. If he turned his sharp tongue on her, she would give it back a hundredfold.

  He stood staring at the forest for several minutes. Finally he tore his gaze away from the trees to look down at the edge of the highway. The end of Earth’s ecosystem was marked with a sharp line, mere millimeters in size, where everything was reduced to fine particles. He looked upward where an aurora-like effect danced in the dusk sky.

  He turned finally to lock his gaze on her.

  Her stepfather had an exotic pedigree. He claimed to be part indigenous Scandinavian Sami and part French. Yves was more of the same with almond-shaped eyes of stunning green and hair that was a rich honey walnut and a face that whispered possible blood ties to the Great Khans of the Mongol Empire. Life had been entirely too kind to him; he still looked twenty.

  She certainly was no longer ten. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We’re the largest defense contractor in United States.” Yves walked past her, focused on the forest. “I’m here as a consultant.”

  Consultant? Maybe if he’d brought a pet scientist on a leash with him, but he seemed utterly alone. Yves was smart, spoke multiple languages, and had a stunning grasp of history, but advanced physics wasn’t in his playbook. What was he really doing here?

  She had already heard rumors floating through the camp that the government was grinding to a halt as various factions started to argue over who had control over the area. Homeland Security, FEMA, and the National Guard were all claiming to be top dog. She hated to ask Yves for help; he was the second-to-last person on the planet that she wanted to be indebted to. The entire planet, though, was at risk. Yves had more connections than she did. He had an entire army of employees and a political network spanning multiple countries. If he were busy playing god with them, he wouldn’t have time to spare to bother her. It would be a win-win for her.

  “Yves, all communities downriver on the Ohio and Mississippi plus probably the Tennessee River need to be warned of possible biological contaminants.”

  He flicked his hand in negation. “There is no need.”

  “If this ecosystem can thrive on Earth…”

  “It cannot,” he stated firmly. “Earth lacks what it needs to thrive. There is no danger.”

  “I have a dinosaur on ice that says otherwise.”

  “It would die within a week on Earth. Yes, on its own world, it would destroy all in its path, but here it would be betrayed by the very genetics that made it so fierce. It would die a slow and painful death as all its cells cry out for the thing that Earth cannot provide. It is like slowly suffocating.”

  “And you know this how?” Lain asked. “Or are you just making random guesses and full-out lies?”

  “History repeats itself. This is not the first time something like this has happened. Only the evidence has always neatly erased itself, so science has never acknowledged what folk tales hold to be true.”

  “Fairy tales?”

  “Atlantis. El Dorado. Garden of Eden. Avalon. Baltia.” Because he knew she didn’t recognize the reference he added, “an island that Pliny the Elder described supposedly entirely made of amber. The seven caves of Chicomoztoc of the Aztecs. Alfheim, land of the elves in Norse myths. Hawaiki. Gorias, Finias, Murias and Falias. Irkalla. The Kingdom of Saguenay. Over and over again, all across the world, in every culture there are stories of other worlds. Lost places. Because we’ve never found evidence of them on Earth, scientists have always dismissed thousands of years of oral history.” He waved his hand at the forest. “Once upon a time there was city called Pittsburgh.”

  Lain didn’t recognize any of the names after Avalon and hated that she needed to take his word that so many existed. “Nothing like this has ever been recorded in th
e last hundred years.”

  “A hundred years: a blink of an eye.” He took a small glass ball from his suit’s breast pocket. “Humans started to use stone tools nearly three million years ago. What is a hundred years compared to that?”

  He stepped down off the highway and onto the forest floor. Lifting the ball to his mouth, he said a word she didn’t recognize. It flickered faintly. Sweeping it back and forth, he walked into the forest.

  “It still proves nothing about this flora and fauna being unable to thrive in Earth’s ecosystem!” Lain shouted after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  When he didn’t answer, she guided her wheelchair carefully down off the thick lip of the highway to follow him. The legs sank deep into the forest debris but her chair was able to pick its way forward.

  Yves stopped a dozen feet into the forest, screened from the road by tall ferns. The glass ball gleamed brightly in his hand. He spoke a second unfamiliar word and the light extinguished. Tucking away the ball, he took what seemed to be a piece of glass out of a pouch and laid it on the ground. With a grease pencil, he drew odd hieroglyphs onto the glass.

  “What are you doing?” She nudged the wheelchair closer.

  “Nothing.”

  She laughed bitterly at the obvious lie. “I’m not ten years old anymore.”

  “And yet you still haven’t learned to keep your nose out of my business.” Yves held up his hand, finger upraised in warning that he wanted her silent. He was the type of person that wouldn’t let the fact that she was in a wheelchair stop him from using whatever force he felt necessary to get his way.

  She was tempted to ignore his request; she’d learned how to fight in the military. Even in the wheelchair, she could defend herself. She had a weird disquieting feeling, though, that he would seriously hurt her if they got into a fight. They were screened from the road. No one had paid any attention to them leaving the encampment. Another helicopter landed with a loud thumping of blades that drowned out all other noise.