Seize the Night

them in our way. Besides, there's not a lot of the night left. We've got to get moving.”
    As we followed the walkway toward the street, he said, “Where?” I had no idea how to search more effectively for Jimmy Wing and Orson in the vastness of Fort Wyvern, so I didn't respond to his question.
    The answer was tucked under the passenger-side windshield wiper on the Jeep. I saw it as I was rounding the front of the vehicle. It looked like a parking ticket.
    I plucked the item from under the rubber blade and switched on the flashlight to examine it.
    When I got into the passenger seat, Bobby leaned over to study my discovery. “Who put it there?”
    “Not Delacroix,” I said, surveying the night, once more overcome by the feeling that I was being watched.
    I was holding a four-inch-square, laminated security badge designed to be pinned to a shirt or to a coat lapel. The photograph on the right half was of Delacroix, although this was a different picture from the one on the driver's license we had found beside his body. He was wide-eyed in this shot, startled, as though he had foreseen his suicide in the flash of the camera. Under the photo was the name Leland Anthony Delacroix . Listed on the left of the badge were his age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, and social security number. At the top were the words initialize on entry . Printed across the entire face of the badge, in a three dimensional hologram that did not obscure the photograph or the information under it, were three transparent, pale-blue capital letters, DOD.
    “Department of Defense,” I said, because my mom had possessed a DOD security clearance, although I'd never seen a badge like this in her possession.
    “Initialize on entry,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “Bet there's a microchip implanted in this.”
    He's computer literate, but I never will be. I have no need for a computer, and with my biological clock ticking faster than yours, I have no time for one. Besides, while wearing heavy-duty sunglasses, I can't easily read a monitor. Sitting for long sessions in front of a screen, you are bathed in low-level UV radiation no more dangerous to you than a spring rain, because of my susceptibility to cumulative damage, however, exposure to those emissions is liable to transform me into one giant lumpy melanoma of such peculiar squishy dimensions that I'll never be able to find clothes that are both comfortable and stylish.
    Bobby said, “When he enters the facility, they initialize the microchip in the badge, you know?”
    “No.”
    “Initialize—clear the memory on the microchip. Then every time he passes through a doorway, maybe the chip in the badge responds to microwave transmitters in the threshold, recording where he went and how long he stayed in each place. Then when he leaves, the data is downloaded into his file.”
    “You creep me out when you talk computer.”
    “I'm still the same full-on jerk-off, bro.”
    “I get evil-twin vibes.”
    “There's just one Bobby,” he assured me.
    I glanced at the bungalow where we had found Delacroix, half expecting to see eerie lights beyond the windows, frenzied bug-wing shadows flitting up the walls, and a shambling cadaver crossing the porch.
    Snapping a finger against the badge, I said, “Tracking every step he makes even after they let him through the front door—that's maximum paranoid security.”
    “This must've been on the floor beside the corpse with the other stuff. Somebody went in the bungalow ahead of us, took it, and put it here. Why?” The answer was to be found in the line at the bottom of the badge. Project Clearance, MT.
    Bobby said, “You think this ID got him into the labs where they were doing these genetic experiments, the very place where the shit hit the fan?”
    “Maybe. MT. Mystery Train?”
    Bobby glanced at the words embroidered on my cap, then at the badge again. “Nancy Drew would be proud.”
    I switched off the flashlight. “I think I know where he wants us to go.”
    “Where who wants us to go?”
    “Whoever left this under the wiper.”
    “Which is who?”
    “I don't have all the answers, bro.”
    “Yet you're positive there's an afterlife,” he said as he started the engine.
    “The big answers I have. It's just some of the little ones that elude me.”
    “Okay, where are we going?”
    “The egg room.”
    “So now we're in a Batman movie, and you're the Riddler?”
    “It's not in Dead Town. It's in a hangar on the north side of the