Rivals by David Wellington

Brent.”
    “I’m… so
sorry.”
    Weathers
shrugged. “You didn’t ask them to do it. I did. I thought the hazmat suits
would be enough to protect them, but I was wrong. Whatever that green fire
stuff is, it kills anyone it comes into contact with. Except you and your
sister. You want to hear some more interesting facts?”
    Brent stared
at Weathers through his fingers. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question.
“Okay,” he tried.
    “We’re pretty
sure the thing, the cylinder you found, was buried for at least sixty thousand
years. They did radiocarbon dating on it and that’s the farthest back that
particular test can go. Which means human beings didn’t build it. Sixty
thousand years ago human beings were still figuring out how to make bows and
arrows.”
    “So it’s a
crashed alien spacecraft?”
    “Sure,”
Weathers said. “Maybe. Those are the facts. You want some more, well, all I
have are theories. Which means I can’t prove any of it. Now as for what that
green fire is, I don’t have the foggiest notion. All I know is that it heals
you if you’re exposed to it—you said it healed Maggie’s blisters and your
razorburn—so maybe it was an automatic medical station or something.”
    “But it’s killed
three people!”
    “Three people,
yes, all of them over age eighteen. I have a bunch of scientists trying to
figure out why teenagers come out of there stronger than when they went in.
The best thing they can think of is that it must have something to do with your
pineal gland. That’s a little pinecone-shaped thing in the middle of your
brain. It produces melatonin, or at least, it does until you finish puberty.”
    “Then what
does it do?”
    Weathers
scratched his left eyebrow. “Then it turns into a lump of bone that does
absolutely nothing. By the time you’re twenty-one it’s completely calcified.
Nobody’s exactly sure why it does that. Nor do we have any idea how an active
pineal gland protected you and your sister from certain death. Again, I don’t have
answers. In this case I don’t even have a theory.”
    Brent nodded.
He squirmed in his chair. He didn’t want to know any of this. He really
didn’t want to know about the two men who died trying to recover his dad’s
body.
    “You won’t
send anyone else in there, will you?” he asked.
    “Oh, no!”
Weathers let go of a bitter laugh. “Hell, no. I’ve got a call in for every
available ton of quick-setting concrete in the state. I’m going to cover that
thing over until it looks like a big parking lot. A parking lot no one will
ever again be allowed to set foot on.”
    Brent squinted
at him. “No way. I thought you would want to study it. Take it to pieces and
figure out how it works. Isn’t that what you do with UFOs?”
    Weathers
looked at him for a while before replying. Just looked at him. “You may be
under the impression that the government is one big conspiracy. That we’re
always scheming and plotting away behind the scenes. But that’s not who we
are. We’re just people. People who work very hard, for not much pay, to try
to protect American citizens. We’ll make sure nobody else dies, Brent. That’s my job.”

Chapter 22.
     
    School was
becoming a hassle. Brent couldn’t ride the bus anymore—reporters kept
trying to sneak onboard, for one thing. For another he had to keep an eye on
Matt Perkins. He had to walk over to Perkins’ house every morning before Matt
even left for school, and at the end of the day he had to follow the bully all
the way home. Occasionally the kid’s abusive dad came out onto the porch and
yelled at Brent to leave his son alone, but really, there was no option. The
very next day after Brent’s original confrontation with the bully, Perkins had
tried to shake down Ryan Digby again. The only way to stop that was to always
be there whenever the two of them met.
    “I don’t think
I can do this forever,” he told Lucy. She had started patrolling with him,
usually while