The Last Handful of Clover - Book 3: The Stone in the Stream

3.26 The Ditto

June 16, 1:00 pm

Twenty-five hours after the assault on the city began, the world had changed irrevocably for those who, through fate or circumstance, found themselves within the confines of the Hereafter. No planes were crossing the sky, since the airport had been shut down and the FAA had restricted airspace over the city. The fire tankers and the military jets were long gone.

Pictures of the devastation were still being broadcast to the world, but now the primary images that came out of Salt Lake City were those beamed worldwide from military surveillance satellites that had been pressed into service. Those images, from thousands of feet above the events on the ground, made it easy to mistake the blasted and ravaged city for some of the bombed out relics left in Europe after the second World War. The country had never seen such devastation visited upon an American city. And those who were still living through it remained terrified, isolated, and doubtful that help would ever arrive.

The winds on this summer day were primarily from the north, and over most of the city, the skies were surprisingly clear. The fires still sent out plumes of smoke that gathered into a persistent haze that grew worse the further south you went until it choked the streets of Provo and eventually drifted like the voices of the dead over the southern Utah desert.

Some of the surveillance photos captured the Oquirrh Mountains, twenty miles southwest of the city. The Oquirrhs were a range of rolling desert hills which separated the city from the town of Tooele. Just north of Tooele were the grid-like remnants of the Tooele Army Depot, where the nation's stockpiles of chemical weapons had been stored, until their eventual destruction was completed in 2012. No longer were there enough stockpiles of VX nerve gas, sarin, and mustard gas stored in these underground bunkers to kill every man, woman, and child on earth.

Further to the west, another small mountain range divided Tooele from Dugway, and the huge and sprawling West Desert Test Center of the US Army. Established in 1942, the WDTC proudly sported the slogan "From Test Tube to Battlefield." And even though the stockpiles of weapons that were stored at Tooele were now long gone, what still went on at the WDTC was equally terrifying.

Just past the heavily guarded gates at the eastern edge of the nearly three quarters of a million acres that comprised the WDTC was the town of Dugway. It was a strangely picturesque little town that looked as if it could have been clipped out of a magazine from a half century before. From above, it looked as if it was placed on the desert, rather than built there.

More than 2,500 scientists, soldiers, military personnel, and support staff and their families, lived in Dugway. The town itself was shaped like a crescent, with two main residential blocks that hugged the schools and community centers at the heart of the little village. Just across Stark Road, which was the principal thoroughfare leading to and from the town, was an incongruous golf course, and then millions of acres of desert, much of it scarred randomly by explosives and weapons tests.

Strangely, all the parks in the town were deserted on this day, as were the streets and even the golf course. The air here was clear, the sky blue, and there was no smoke or other sign of the devastation that was continuing to ravage the city to the east. Even so, a pall hung over the city, as if no parent would allow their children to venture forth into a world where such horrors could exist, no matter how distant.

From above, Dugway looked like a ghost town.

Ten miles further west along Stark Road was Michael Army Air Field. Its two runways were over 11,000 feet long, which was enough to accommodate even the largest aircraft deployed by the US military.

Immediately adjacent to the airfield itself was a facility known by the colloquial name of "The Ditto."

Despite its rather playful name, the Ditto was where secret research into the world's most deadly substances was still being carried out. Even though the huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction from Tooele were now long gone, that didn't mean that there weren't still American scientists sequestered in highly secure and isolated laboratories and underground bunkers. There they toiled under fluorescent lights, studying the latest and greatest breakthroughs in man's quest to kill each other more easily, and with greater terror, than ever before.

The weapons they developed were designated as CBRN: Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear; and the laboratories and test chambers in which they were studied and developed looked, from the sky, like twenty square blocks of nondescript warehouses, trailers, and concrete block buildings, surrounded by dusty streets and blowing tumbleweeds.

This was the Ditto. And like the town of Dugway just down the road, it too seemed strangely calm. There were few vehicles here this day, and almost no traffic on the roads. Not a single soul could be seen venturing between the buildings, as if they had all been locked down, or even abandoned.

A hawk, flying over the scene, might not detect a single sign of life. In fact, at exactly 1:00 pm on June 16, there was only one trace of movement in the entirety of the Ditto.

At a simple wooden barracks near the edge of the complex, a Jeep without a top had just pulled up, and an old soldier got out heavily, looking tired and leaning on his fender for a moment. He took a cane from the back seat of the vehicle. And then, slowly, he made his way into the building.