VII






"Ok……"

Meg winced as a large black man suddenly elbowed her and cut in front of her. She could only growl as he walked past her.

"…Jerk."

It was 1:00, fifteen minutes until her meeting with General Chuck Yeager, the American hero primed to become the oldest supersonic flyer in the world on this day at the age of 64, along with being the first forty years ago to the date. Of course, having been anti-war since Vietnam - she marched in several different protests, including the Million Man March of 1964 where she was close enough to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King speak; she was only 10 at the time - she wasn't all that keen on meeting Chuck Yeager in the middle of a hot sunny day - in the middle of a desert, no less.

"Where the hell is the press booth?" Meg shook her head angrily as she mumbled. "It said on the briefing I'm supposed to go to Line C. There is no Line C here. George, you had better not have screwed me over…yet again…."

Next to her, Joan and Naoto were talking in low voices in Japanese. Though Meg suspected it was about her, something in their tone, including the fact that Joan was pointing to the planes in the distant field, made it apparent that she was not the subject of their conversation.

"….Excuse me." Meg finally found a handsome Air Force sergeant walking past her. She got his arm. "Where's line C for the reporters?"
"Ma'am?"
"I'm a reporter." Meg searched her new jacket, presenting her press card to him. "There's a Line C?"
"Oh…" The sergeant looked over towards the field. "There will be an announcement in several minutes concerning that. Those who are with proper Associated Press and Reutger Network identifications will be allowed to interview the general for three minutes regarding various subjects."
"…..Thanks."

Meg gave the sergeant a look as he left; in the same vein she cursed the heat. Yet it was only her face that felt the afternoon heat. For some reason, the skin under her jacket felt temperate; she felt comfortable, even safe, wearing it still. She still could not understand why this was so, either way; it was an old jacket she impulsively bought on a whim. Yet she somehow felt like she needed it for reasons she had yet to learn.

"The winds are pickin' up today!"
"Yuppers."

Meg's ears picked up at that. She looked around towards several senior citizens behind her. They wore jackets similar in style to the one she wore, though theirs had many different military insignias on them. All of them, however, were Air Force veterans, as their hats had squadron decal, followed by a suitable nickname and the squadron's famous battles. Judging from their seeming physical appearances, they all seemed to be WWII and Korean War veterans as well.

"Yup." One of them nodded. "Its definitely the 14th. It always happens on October 14th. The stronger winds are starting to pick up from over the eastern hills. It'll pick up even more by the time they start flying the jets."

Something about this mindless chatter suddenly interested Meg for no particular reason she could truly think of. Quietly, she began to slowly eavesdrop on the old men, wondering if they would say anymore on it. Of course, being old men, she knew they would.

"You think he's here?"
"Far as I can tell," the old man, who had an eyepatch on his left side, chuckled. "He would never miss it for the world if we all know him."
"Of course not."
"You think he'll be on the roof of the hangar this time?" One of them was grinning at this. "I saw him with my own eyes on the hangar roof back in '54 when I was up there cleanin' the gutter as a private! I was right there next to him, and he didn't even notice me! And if I had a camera-"
"You always say that, John!"
"Hey, but any of you buckaroos claim you saw his profile better than me? Nuh uh, no siree!"
"…Hmm?"

Suddenly, Meg felt eyes on her. She looked up to see that one of the men - fat, puffy, and his hair slicked back with oil under his cap - was looking at her.

"Can we help you, ma'am?"
"Um…" Meg saw everyone looking at her at the question. She poised herself. "I'm just wondering what you may have been talking about."
"Well, who're you?
"My name is Margaret Rye." She crossed her arms. "I'm a reporter for…."

The general consensus of the group towards her was a sudden, subtle suspicion, and Meg almost regretted telling them her true profession. After all, old men who had been in the military had long memories in regards to reporters (unlike her, who did not feel the past had bearing on present situations) - all the media itself for that matter, because the media, mainly anti-war at most times in the present (like herself), caused problems.

It was the media, after all, who created the myth of the all-American heroes as they came home from the European and Pacific theaters - all of the young Joes and Johnnys, strapping in their uniforms, returning from a drafted war against the evils. Hitler, Mussolini, the Japs - their war was glamorized by the papers, by the movies. Even the grittier films had some dashing hero, or some gorgeous paragon whom saved the day, or died valiantly in the struggle to save the world. The newsreels they showed, too, promoted the American spirit the lads showed, how they freed their conquered brethren from the Nazi war machine, smiling as they went along.

This was forty years ago, and the media still sometimes showed it that way - that the Second World War was the ultimate battle against evil, a grand story to make into a movie, one to passed down through the ages. But everyone knew that the war wasn't as glamorous or as glorious as the press said. It was gruesome, the fatalities and lives destroyed were unparalleled by anything else in human history save the bubonic plague - and there were things that the government didn't want people to know, and the media complied.

Death, destruction, untold horrors of inhumanity at its most vicious; millions died, and many saw torture on top of the sights which they were forced to endure. Men who had bonded together in their groups saw their comrades die with their own eyes. All of them killed at least one person on their tours of duty.

Yet the men who came home came home to a heroes' welcome, so overwhelmed by how they had been shown in the media that the violent shift back to normalcy nearly killed some of them. They could not concentrate on their lives when they hadn't been able to deal with what they had seen during their years out of the country. But the government - aided by the media - strongly stressed that the men could never talk of their war experiences, to put them behind and suppress them forever, because they didn't want people to know how terrible the war truly was. At least, they would say, put the memories off until you had children. Many men cracked, many managed to keep their thoughts to themselves, but to work their frustration and sadness in other ways. It was only recently that some veterans had started to really talk to the media, and when they talked, they still could not handle it, and the story that the papers presented was still skewed.

It was this legacy of uneasiness towards the press - they who helped to complicate the problems of some of their battalion brethren returning home all that time ago - that Meg suddenly felt thrown towards her. For this, she figured she knew why they were suspicious, and knew she had to reassure them that prying their war memories was the last thing on her mind (since, horrible as it would seem to some, she could care less about that).

"I was only wondering who you were talking about. I'm not on duty." She looked at each of the veterans uneasily, showing her pockets. She had been careful to put her audio recorder in her purse to avoid it getting stolen, and she knew that her badge was in her jacket pocket. For those precautions, she was secretly thankful. "I don't care about anything but that. If its…..well……then I apologize for-"
"Oh!" The leader of them, the one whom Meg had first heard, shook his head and laughed. "Oh, no, no one we knew like that. Just a little local thing here in these parts. Everyone knows about it, so I assume you're out of town?"
"….Yes…."
"Oh, oh." The other veterans began to laugh. "Its nothin' more than a little ghost story, an urban legend."
"It's something us airmen and field men remember back in our days during the wars."
"What is it? A ghost?"
"The Hedgehog."
"…The…."

Meg suddenly felt another sensation at the word 'hedgehog'. Again, it felt connected to the jacket she wore, and she couldn't help but look shocked for a moment.

"Oh, its connected to this very airfield and this very occasion, young lady." The men, eager to tell her the story, did not notice her expression. "When they were working on the X-1 back in the 40's, there were several injuries, and even a death."
"Really?" Meg was, for the first time this whole trip, sincerely surprised. "I didn't know that."
"Yup, one of the few things the press doesn't know about." Meg felt herself redden a little as the old men laughed. "No one outside top Army Air Force brass ever knew for a long time there had been problems with the project. Lots of parts are still top-secret to this day, and everything that the American public knows is only the positive stuff and only the least of the problems. Hell, I think even Yeager met with some security problems when he went to publish a book…..damn, what was it called, Mike?"
"The Right Stuff, John. I think."
"That one was about NASA, you idiots."
"Right, right. Whatever." The man grinned sheepishly. "But everyone who worked on Blue Gale knew the truth."
"Blue Gale?"
"Code name for the project." The man with the eyepatch looked at Meg. "There was one thing in particular that got a few people wondering. In some of the transcripts, there's a discrepancy about the death."
"A discrepancy?"
"Yup. The death was placed on September 15, 1947, during a hangar fire." At this, his voice lowered. "But the death wasn't even reported until almost November. And according to an Air Force buddy of the deceased who had attended the funeral, there were no remains to bury. Not a speck of ash to the pilot's name. It was as if his body had disappeared - and that was on the official report, that they lost the body." The leader of the veterans rubbed his nose. "Sounds too careless if you ask me, even for a division of the armed forces still in its infancy."
"….Really, now."

At this point, Joan, who had been talking to Naoto in Japanese, noticed Meg talking to the old men. She strained to listen while keeping the impression that she herself was not eavesdropping.

"Unusual." The fat veteran nodded. "Oh, a lot of theories abounded, everything from the Roswell aliens kidnapping him to the government just downright killing him for some unknown reason. But the most compelling and most obvious theory was none of those."
"The most compelling?"
"It involves…."

At this, the veterans looked around uneasily. It was Meg's turn to stare at them, not sure of what they would say. Whatever they said, she knew, would at the least be a little bit interesting in relation to the boring (and sometimes confusing) day she was having.

"…..Well…." Finally, the fat veteran spoke, his voice going lower in volume than ever. "….Chuck wasn't the first one to break the sound barrier."
"….What?!"

Meg almost shouted this in surprise. It was not what she would have expected, and under most circumstances she would have just laughed it off as an attempt to discredit Chuck Yeager's achievements (not that she wasn't open to the idea of doing that on her own). However, whatever feeling was pervading her to be nice to Joan and Naoto today, whatever made her feel safe within the jacket, also caused her to somehow have little doubt of what the veterans were saying, and she almost huddled in her new jacket.

"There was another person who did it several hours before him." The veterans' voice was barely above a whisper. "Supposedly, this guy went up and broke the sound barrier…..but his plane blew up. They only found pieces of the plane; his body was incinerated beyond salvation."
"…..No way….." This was from Joan, whom the veterans did not hear or see behind Meg.
"They didn't want the project to go bust, so they let Chuck go up and take the glory. But while the original supersonic pilot died, his spirit lives on. His ghost, changed by his anger over being stiffed of his rightful fame, lets everyone know who really did it, every time the 14th of October comes around here at Edwards." The veterans' voice went back to normal volume after this. "Sometimes he's at the hangar, sometimes he's at the tower, sometimes even in the cockpit of a plane or on the runway, right in the way of a plane. He's definitely a prankster."
"Changed? Changed how?"
"How else? He became a beast."
"That's right, little missy. A poltergiest!"
"Aaah, shut yer mouth, Ben." The fat veteran laughed. "You know jack @#%$ about ghosts."
"Aah, but I saw him too! I tried to catch him-"
"I…see…." Somehow, such a primal apparition didn't click with Meg, as she had always imagined ghosts as having white sheets over them as children would, or at least looking human. "Who was this pilot, or is that a secret as well?"
"…Welp…" The veterans looked at one another, though they didn't look as if it was such a secret. "No one knows his real name, but we all know his pet name. It's the name that the ground crewman, who told us about him after the first sighting, knew him as."
"And that is….?"
"Hedgehog."

Meg's heart stopped at that. Something about the word came back to her; she felt her skin grow clammy at the thought of what implications it could have for her.

"Oh! There we go." The group of veterans started to walk. "About time this damn line started moving again…."

Meg also saw the line start to move, and when they moved the veterans went back to their mindless talking. Only, it didn't seem so mindless now to Meg; something about the word "hedgehog" as applied to a person's name made her blood curl in a way she would have never thought possible. For a few minutes, she did not get why it made her feel this way.

Then, somehow, it hit her.

….The jacket.

She instantly took it off and swung it to the back. The strange blue decal was there, as well as the word "SONIC" under it, also blue. For the first time, her mind truly began to wonder about it. And she as only beginning to understand what she had just learned.

"….Scott Garnet."
"…..What?"

Meg looked at Joan, her eyes wide. Joan and Naoto, in return, looked shocked and astonished as well, though Naoto looked a little more confused. She looked up from the jacket to Meg's shocked face, then back at the jacket.

"….Oh my god…."
"What…?"
"Captain Scott Garnet." An astonished smile came upon Joan's face. "Mary Garnet's husband. That was his nickname. Hedgehog."
"His…."

Meg looked down at the jacket, then back up at the Japanese woman. All the information she was getting, which should have been pointless and forgettable to Meg under normal circumstances, were beginning to confound her, even excite her, to entice her to learn more. The lure seemed so simple, the story too good to be true.

Yet, if it is true….

"ATTENTION, ALL PRESS CARD HOLDERS." The speakers around the field suddenly crackled to life. "PLEASE REPORT TO THE NORTHEAST POINT OF THE FIELD FOR YOUR INTERVIEWS WITH GENERAL YEAGER AT THE PRESS BOOTH. AGAIN-"
"That's your cue." Meg felt Joan nudge her. "Good luck, I guess….."
"……Thank you……"

Meg's voice was as dazed as her thoughts. She almost walked mindlessly out of the line and around the parking lot. She had a long bit to walk, but she didn't care at the moment.

A puzzle.

It had all started the moment she had gotten off the plane, but she realized that the coincidences, as too good to be true as they seemed, were far too connected for any real reporter to ignore. A puzzle was beginning to form in front of her, right in her face. From the jacket, to Joan to the old men; all morning, pieces had been fitting in snugly with some big picture. Yet she had had no clue of it. She didn't know she was supposed to be solving anything.

Yet, as she zipped her new jacket up, she realized. Somehow, she was supposed to solve something here. Something big. Something very big. Something so big, that it could change the very course of history as people knew it - hell, as she knew it.

Thank you, George…. she could almost feel the irony cut through her throat as she finally found the small stream of reporters gathered around the northeast gate of the field. I guess this wasn't such a dud story after all…..