Zero Hour: Where are our Children (A Serial Novel) Episode 5 of 9

by Gary Sapp

“I can take you to him, right now if you wish. He’s nearby.”

  “Is there any thread of decency pumping through your veins at all?” Yet, Chris found himself waving his gun at her to lead to wherever she was trying to take him. He would have killed her at the mere suggestion of this impossibility but Scotty’s words were ringing in his head as if he were at the Vatican on an Easter Sunday: I am talking about real truth; the type of earthshaking truth that Thomas Pepper claims that follows him around. You are on the cusp of learning a truth so wondrous…and yet, so very tragic, that you will never look at the opposite sides of the same coin the same ever again.”

  Leave the dead alone.

  He wanted to tell both Serena Tennyson and Benjamin Scott.

  “I would, Chris,” He must have told her after all. “If only he would leave me alone.”

  “Go to Hell, Serena.”

  “I have.” She said. “A part of me does every time I look into my flames.” Serena nodded her head. She gazed at Chris but he could tell that at least a piece of her spirit was well outside these walls.

  She reached her hand out to him.

  “Join me,”

  “Stop this, Serena,” Chris warned her and slapped her hand away. “Stop this right now…if you quit this mockery, then I won’t kill you, I’ll just turn you over to Agent Sheridan of the FBI.”

  “There is no treachery here on my part, Chris. There is no betrayal awaiting you beyond these walls.” She said. “Come with me now. I assure you that you will be safe.”

  “Why are you torturing me?”

  But Chris followed where she led.

  She turned and walked towards him in the smallest strides that her long legs allowed her. He had his gun out with the barrel trained on her forehead. She continued her approach. He could have shot her. He should have shot her. He targeted her neck, her chest, her flat stomach as she continued to approach him…

  She reached him at long last and pointed the gun down at the floor. She didn’t try to take it from him. She did not respond with some type of weapon or offensive of her own.

  The onlookers…observed what the two of them were doing on, unsure of what they should do to counter it.

  “No more threats, Chris. There is no more need for false bravado or innuendo from either one of us. If you want to see your father, then you should come with me.”

  And so he did just that.

  Chris followed Serena out of the nursing home into an old schoolhouse directly behind it that had closed decades ago. He kept his weapon to his side, decided to leave it there and not train it on her unless she gave him reason to. Anyway, his chance to kill her without passing another conscious thought had passed never to return. Even without his official title he still thought of himself as an agent of The Federal Bureau of Investigations. More importantly, he was the proud son of a mother and father who had taught him that all life was precious. And he still thought himself an honorable man.

  And yet he’d given his opposition the opening she’d needed to have him killed at any moment.

  The old schoolhouse stank of mold and mildew when they arrived on its grounds.

  Worse, it seemed to Chris to be something beyond simple staleness that he couldn’t immediately recognize. Serena shielded her face against obstructions as she walked through the darkness as if this dead place was a second home to her. She opened a door to what Chris only could call the main office, stepped over an old broken desk and continued to go wherever Serena led.

  Chris felt his emotions riding the rollercoaster from anger to fear to curious and back again. Whatever was going to happen to him, he decided to let the scene play itself out. He cursed himself for allowing himself to lose control of this situation back at the nursing home. And yet, another part of him said any so called control had been lost when he agreed to meet this woman in the first place. Even when I was kicking her senselessly…she was in control of me, all along.

  Serena finally halted her progress at the principal’s office and turned around to face him.

  “He told me that you loved hot dogs.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “When he took you to the baseball game…he told me that you loved hot dogs. You loved to eat them and down your food with ginger ale. You had so much to eat and drink that night in fact that you had to rush to the bathroom before you left for home. He counted on that and you did not disappoint.”

  “Shut up,” Chris screamed at her. “Is this what all of the fuss you’ve been making? I know you have skilled intelligence people, Serena. I know that they fed you this information. No one ever said your operatives weren’t good at their jobs.”

  Out of nowhere a light flicked on.

  The sudden brightness nearly blinded him and he pointed his gun in her general direction in case this was it—and this meeting with his father was to be on the other side of life and death with his ambush and murder all along.

  Serena did nothing.

  She relaxed her muscles against a far wall.

  An old projection movie began playing on the chalk board that was in the office.

  Chris recognized himself and his father walking down the concourse towards the restroom on the third deck. How did they capture this image?

  “You’ve used CGI technology,” Chris dismissed what his eyes were clearly seeing. “Somehow you recreated the setting and used animation of myself and my father to fill in the rest of this imagery.”

  Serena shook her head. “The Braves were terrible that summer like they were most of the summers during the middle to late 1970’s and into the early 80’s.”

  “I’ve told you to shut up, Serena.” He started for the door, but the images felt so real that the picture kept bringing him back to see more. “I won’t listen to this.”

  “Then maybe you should only watch, Chris.”

  And so he did as she asked once again.

  Two more projections popped up to the right and to the left of the first picture. These new angles showed his abduction by Louis Keaton just as if he were narrating to story to Angel all over again back at the motel down state a few days ago. Keaton approached him from behind and it was even more frightening to watch the Chris of his childhood being snatched from a third person point of view. He felt a shiver run down his spine as he watched his father actually follow him into the bathroom two minutes after he entered—

  And watch the door for intruders as Keaton took him.

  “No,” Chris said with a small voice. He pointed his gun at Serena once again. It seemed the thing to do. “I’m through playing games with you, Serena. You said you would take me to my father not show me these heavily edited old documentaries fresh from the Pandora archives.”

  And before she could answer him Chris added: “What is so special about this old place? And what is that smell?”

  “I know that you don’t want to, Chris, but you’ll need to trust me for a small while longer. Your father is here. You need to open one more door and you’ll be with him again.”

  And so he followed her into a conference room that was adjoined to the Principal’s office. This room proved darker than either one that they’d occupied before. He even asked her why it was so very dark in here. If she had another light to switch right now would be a good time.

  And whatever that horrid smell was it nearly overwhelmed him.

  She snapped on a light that had no business existing in a building as old and as decaying as this one.

  A skeleton was seated at the head on the conference table and stared up at him.

  Serena spoke quickly. “I’ve kept my promise to you. Say hello to your father, Chris.”

  He fired a round in her direction—intentionally missing her, or so he told himself.

  Glass shattered behind her.

  Serena Tennyson had ice in her veins for she barely moved at all.

  “I should kill you where you stand. You are truly a sick woman. It’s no wonder you reached Keaton. This isn’t my father’s remains
. It can’t be.”

  She slowly pulled a folder of documents out of a drawer and pushed them towards Chris. He only glanced at them at first…and then gave them a wider birth. There were records of a body that had been dug up and placed in the driver seat of the car to look as if his father had been killed by a drunken driver.

  Next he saw a second official document that appeared to be death certificate marked ten years after he and everyone else was led to believe that his father truly died. Dental records had been provided matching the new date deceased date. Isaac Prince’s fingerprints were available. The DNA lab reports had been ran and rerun by a formal friend of his who had abandoned the bureau—like so many others—for Serena Tennyson’s Pandora.

  “I’ve always thought it was more than noble of you to never to have taken a drink of alcohol in remembrance of the manner that you thought your father was taken from you.”

  “Isaac Prince was killed in a car accident.” Chris said in a demanding tone. “You’ve doctored most of this information somehow and forged the rest. Scotty drove to the home where I was living with Xavier and his mother. He told us everything that happened.”

  And Serena quoted Scotty’s words of that fateful day as if she’d scripted them herself.

  “Why would Scotty lie to me?” Chris felt the tears begin to fall; the truth of it all…his Whirlwind setting in. “What is the meaning of all of this deception?”

  “Your father sacrificed one of his lives so he could pursue his other without further interruption.” Serena said. “I must admit that his choice is not