The truck stopped, and, again, I dismounted. Closer to the blast zone!

The fire’s heat baked my exposed cheeks. It sucked air to itself, making wind that snapped at my uniform sleeves. I guessed I was a couple miles from downtown, if the Projectile had hit dead center. This neighborhood remained recognizable, brick warehouses or old offices, half-flattened. Even after a day, the flames at city center volcanoed a half mile high. Their roar shook the street so the broken glass that paved it shimmered as it reflected the orange firestorm. The truck turned back before I could blink.

Fifty feet away, a middle-aged captain was silhouetted against the firestorm. He stood alongside a folding table, and above him rose an ash-coated canvas canopy. The canopy centered three sides of a square formed by olive drab trailers. Floodlights on poles glared down on the canopy while a portable generator buzzed somewhere.

He shouted through cupped hands. “You’re not in hell, but you can see it from here.”

I saluted. Instead of returning it, the captain waved me closer, with a tired hand untrained by Field Manual FM 22-5, Drill and Ceremony.

He looked me up and down, his hands on his hips. “Ever had experience with extraterrestrials?”

I smirked. “My drill sergeant’s pretty strange.”

He sighed. “Well, I told them I just needed a strong back. Coffee?” He waved at an aluminum pot and stacked cups on the table.

“I’m Howard Hibble.”

I shook his hand. It was so thin he’d never make one dead-hang pull-up. His uniform was contemporary camouflage pattern, not like our last-century training togs. Captain’s bars hung crooked from one side of his collar and the Military Intelligence Compass-Rose-Dagger from the other.

Captain Hibble ran a lean hand through flattop gray hair and dragged on a tobacco cigarette. “Don’t expect drill-sergeant crap from me. You’ve probably been in the army longer than I have. Until last month I was Walker Professor of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Studies at the University of Nevada. Believe it or not.”

I believed. He’d never spent time with the likes of Drill Sergeant Ord. His uniform sagged over his scarecrow frame, as wrinkled as the skin of his face. His boots looked like he shined them with a Hershey bar.

“All my life I hoped we weren’t alone in the universe.” He hacked and looked around at the flames. “Now I wish we were.”

“What am I doing, here, sir?”

“For now, bunk in that truck over there. I’m the only one in this menagerie still awake. We go when its cooler and lighter.”

I’d been bouncing in a deuce-and-a-half since before the previous dawn. The “extraterrestrials” remark sounded ominous, but “bunk” was music to my ears.

By morning, the firestorm had burned itself out. The wind had died, and only scattered fires flickered.

I stumbled, scratching, into the dawn and toward the latrine.

Other soldiers wandered the quadrangle formed by the truck trailers. I use the term “soldier” loosely. Unlaced boots and stubble sprouted everywhere. Ord would explode if he saw this bunch. This whole unit had to be

Intel weenies. I’d heard outfits like this existed. “Unconventional” assemblages of brainy weirdos. I eavesdropped on yawned conversations. This platoon included aerospace engineers, biologists, even psychics and aboriginal water-sniffers. As a race we were grasping every straw in the search for answers.

Under the center canopy, Hibble scavenged through a cardboard doughnut box. He stepped away, chewing, while powdered sugar flurried onto his chest. “Help yourself. Then you and I are going into the city core to hunt Projectile fragments.”

I spit crumbs. “In there?” The city center was still a molten, orange pit.

“In protective suits.”

“Protective? But the fragments—”

“Aren’t radioactive.” He nodded. “Not even explosive. These devices are just large masses moving at high speeds. Enough kinetic energy to incinerate a city. Last century, humans bombed Dresden and Tokyo into firestorms with incendiaries. But big rocks from space work, too. Ask the dinosaurs.”

“Why hunt fragments?”

He rolled his eyes at the smoke. “What else have we got to study? But we pegged the enemy as extra-solar system that way. The metals were too exotic for our neighborhood.”

I had a feeling Howard’s neighborhood and mine differed by light-years. He fitted me out with a goggled, rubber respirator mask. One of those firefighter-technology deals with the little sidepack that manufactures oxygen. Over our uniforms we each wore fire-resistant coveralls and boot covers. I also got to wear an empty backpack.

We drove toward the city center until the rubble deepened, then left his ancient car, he called it a Jeep, and hiked.

Smoke, flickering firelight, and my goggles blurred tipped, brick walls that towered above us, poised to crush us at every turn.

My heart pounded. I glanced around at the debris, expecting to find a bloody, severed limb or a charred body under every drywall slab.

“Jason, don’t expect this to be a graves-registration detail.”

“A what?”

“We won’t see many recognizable remains. When a skyscraper collapses on a body, a person disappears.”

I squeezed my eyes shut at the image. Respirator or not, I breathed through my mouth and still smelled burned flesh.

Howard held his aluminum walking stick out for balance and high-wired across a blackened girder that bridged a brick pile. I followed, knees shaking. I joined him on the other side as the girder groaned, snapped, and a ton of bricks cascaded next to Howard.

“Watch out!”

He waved his stick. “You’ll get used to it”

Insulated suit notwithstanding, sweat trickled down my cheeks inside the mask. My lenses fogged. As we closed on ground zero, buildings no longer existed separately. I recognized only occasional doorframes or papered walls. A corkscrewed electrovan bumper wore a charred sticker, mt.

LEBANON HONOR STUDENT. I swallowed.

“How do you find things in this mess, Howard?” He shrugged. “Practice. And instinct My grandfather was a prospector.” He paused. “Did you lose family in this, Jason?” His voice buzzed through his respirator.

“All of it. My mom. Indianapolis.”

He stopped. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “You?”

“My only living relative was an uncle who lived in Phoenix.”

“So we’re both orphans.”

“Lot of that going around, these days.” He duck-walked under a blackened wood beam angled between two rubble piles.

“Howard! That looks shaky!”

“I have a nose for these things.” He waved his hand without turning around, then poked ashes aside with his walking stick. “Holy Moly!”

Definitely an Intel weenie. Any self-respecting GI would have said “fuck!”

He bent and tugged at something. “Jason, come over—”

The debris mound that supported one end of the beam rattled. Above Howard’s head, pulverized brick pebbles trickled.

The beam above him teetered.

I lunged. “Howard!”

Whump.

Dust swirled. Where there had been Howard there was now a wall-board-and-charred-lumber mound.

“Howard!”

No answer but the fire’s roar.

I had liked Howard. He was as goofy as Walter Loren-zen but as genuine.

I dug, flinging board and plaster and found a boot, a pant leg, then all of Howard. The beam pinned his chest.

I brushed dust from his mask lenses.

“Howard?”

He opened his eyes and gasped. “Holy Moly!”

The beam’s charcoal surface crumbled warm in my hands but on the second try I budged it, and he wriggled out.

I dropped the beam and made an ash cloud, then faced him.

He stood staring down at an object he turned in his gloved hands.

“Howard, you okay?”

“Perfect. Thank you, Jason. You saved my life. More important, you saved this.”

“What is it?”

“Not sure. But it’s alien.”