Orange Glory — John Klawitter

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, in the heart of the Cold War against the Ruskies and the Chi Coms, well-meaning but amoral officials in U.S. intelligence greatly feared Russian advances in the development of paranormal capabilities in humans. In response to this threat to national security, they covertly started up a number of projects to develop U.S. proto-types of ‘super-humans.' The most ambitious of their edgy reaches into the unknown was code-named PROJECT ORANGE GLORY, and it concerned spraying human subjects with the disintegrating sub-particles radiating from cyclotron impact zones. Nucleonic science was in its infancy, and nearly all the subjects died. However, the few dozen who survived displayed almost incomprehensible behavior. They couldn't understand it, but they realized it was unpredictable and dangerous on a global scale. Project Orange Glory was deemed a failure, and Charley Birch, who had spearheaded the project from the first, was blamed and given the job of disposing of the remaining subjects. But he soon found the victims (he refers to them as ‘Zoomins') were nearly impossible to kill. He rounded up as many as he could and imprisoned them on a remote island. As our story opens, Charley is out to kill or capture one particular Zoomin, Kate Twillinger, the daughter of one of his original subjects, who is unknowing of the secret experiments that have been performed on her, and is living on a family orange grove in a remote section of Central Florida.