Free Bad Glass by Richard E. Gropp Page A

doesn’t know what else to do.”
    I nodded, remembering the Jeep with the P.P. plates on the outskirts of the city. Maybe I
wasn’t
falling behind. Maybe there weren’t any competing photographers in the city. Not anymore, at least. But the threat of prison—not even prison, I realized, but military detainment as some type of enemy combatant—made me feel downright nauseated.
No guts, no glory
, I told myself, but the feeling refused to go away.
    I took a deep breath and watched as Taylor handed Danny Charlie’s USB drive. He sat back down at his computer and plugged it in, double clicking an icon as soon as it appeared on the screen. After a couple of seconds, Danny removed the drive and handed it back to Taylor.
    “What was that?” I asked. “What did you just do?”
    “Charlie’s program,” Taylor explained. “We load up all of our email, Danny plugs it into the military network, and it launches a burst of encrypted data out into the real world.” She smiled at the phrase. “Charlie’s got a server on the outside—decrypts all of that information and forwards it on. It also downloads all of our incoming mail, along with the latest news from a bunch of sites.” She held up the tiny drive. “It’s all in here, ready for us to start surfing at our leisure. We do it every couple of days. We’ll get you hooked up next time around.”
    “And the military doesn’t know? Isn’t that dangerous?”
    “Nah,” Danny said, dismissing the concern with a wave of his hand. “Charlie’s got it streamlined down to a couple of hundred packets. As long as we aren’t sending out high-definition video, it’s barely noticeable. Besides, I know guys who surf hard-core porn from their military terminals. Next to some of the nasty shit I’ve seen on their screens, this is tulips and butterflies.”
    “He also recharges for us.” Taylor pointed to a power strip beneath the soldier’s desk. “I’m sure he’d do your camera for you.”
    I nodded. The thought of throwing my battery charger up through a third-story window didn’t exactly fill me with joy—whenI was a kid, I never played Little League, and my throwing arm was for shit—but it was nice to know I had the option.
    “And now that we’ve got business out of the way …” Taylor took a step back, leaving me hanging over Danny’s shoulder, transforming the two of us into unintentional conspirators. “Why don’t you tell Dean about what you’re doing here? Catch us up on all of that great government progress.”
    Danny gave Taylor a scowl, then turned back to his computer. He popped open a window and started scouring through directories, looking for something. “What do you know, Dean? About the phenomenon?”
    “I’ve been following it on some underground message boards, and there’s been some stuff that hasn’t made it into the mainstream press. Some strange pictures. Some video. Vague, translucent figures, weird physics. Kids in a cell-phone video, bouncing a ball through a—” I paused, trying to think how best to describe it. “—a
sticky
space in the air, where the ball just slows down, then speeds up again, finally stopping and hovering in midair. Everybody knows
something’s
going on here—there’s no denying the quarantine or the government’s refusal to talk—but nobody knows exactly what. Some type of terrorist attack, maybe. A chemical leak. A haunting.” I smiled at this last suggestion. “Maybe something to do with an ancient Indian burial ground?”
    Danny didn’t smile. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of scientists trying to figure it all out. Here, on this floor, we’re just gathering information. We catalog incident reports—from civilians, from our soldiers on patrol—and look for patterns.” He lifted a clipboard from the clutter on his desk. It held a photocopied sheet titled
REPORT OF UNEXPLAINED INCIDENT
. This particular sheet had been filled out in red ink.
    Before he set it back down, I managed to read a