by Mark Lukens
And then Michelle had come along. I wanted to quit for her.
But had it been my idea to quit drinking, or had it been Michelle’s idea? Had it been another suggestion she had planted inside of me. Maybe the alcohol interfered with their program somehow.
If so, then good.
I opened another beer.
“I’m so sorry you’re involved with this,” I told Alicia after she sat down on the bed closer to the bathroom.
“I had my chance to turn away,” she said. “After our . . . our session, I knew you had been programmed somehow. I didn’t have to get your medications tested. I didn’t have to delve any deeper into this.”
I nodded, but I didn’t want her taking full responsibility for this. It still felt like we were in danger, but it also felt like we might be safe for the moment, tucked away in some forgotten family-run motel on the beach.
“How do you know Stan?” I asked.
She smiled. “A friend of a friend. I don’t really know him all that well. My friend said Stan’s into wild conspiracy theories.”
“Yes,” I said. “We hear all about them at work.”
“I had my doubts when Stan contacted me about you, but he made it sound so convincing. And then when he sent me the videos of you sleepwalking, I was intrigued. I’d only read of a few cases about this kind of level of mind-control hypnosis. It’s exceedingly rare.”
“Or maybe not,” I said. “Maybe there are more of us than people know about. Obviously, they don’t want any of this stuff to be public knowledge.”
“Yeah. I guess that could be possible.”
I imagined all of the other “robots” out there across the country, living what they thought were normal lives, living with people they thought loved and cared about them, not knowing that their wife or husband was really their handler, helping to program them and waiting until they were activated.
“Stan thinks I was programmed to be an assassin or a terrorist,” I said and sipped my beer, nearly finishing it. “And the two guys we went to see tonight, they thought so, too. That time and date, four o’clock on the eleventh, it must be the time I’m supposed to do something.”
Alicia didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to do it now, but maybe they’ll get someone else. Maybe they already know I’ve been compromised and they’ve got another patsy on the way, another robot they’re reprogramming.”
She just sipped her bottle of beer, watching me.
I stared at Alicia, not looking away. “I can’t let it happen. I have to try to stop this somehow. I don’t know how, but I have to try.” I couldn’t stomach the thought of a bomb going off and killing people without trying to do something to stop it. I knew when it was going to happen, but I didn’t know where.
“I’d like to try something,” Alicia said as I got up to get my third beer. She still hadn’t even drunk half of her first one.
“What?” I asked after chugging some of the next beer down.
“I’d like to hypnotize you. Ask you some questions. Maybe we could figure out the triggers inside of you. Maybe you might remember some things while you’re under, details that could help us, details about exactly what you’re supposed to do.”
“You don’t have to do this,” I told her.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to involve you any deeper into this than you already are.”
She nodded. “Yes, but I already am involved. And I want to help, too. And I think the only way we’re going to get more information about what you’re supposed to do on the eleventh is to put you under hypnosis.”
I wanted to be excited by the idea, but I also felt overwhelmed, like a dark cloud was drifting down onto me, covering me and pressing down on me, making me helpless. I would be giving my control to Alicia, someone I barely knew.
“Only if you want to,” she said quickly, gauging my reaction. “It’s got to be something you want to do.” She paused for just a moment. “We could videotape it if you want to.”
“Okay,” I said. Maybe she was right. Maybe it would work and she would find something out that was hidden in my subconscious somewhere.
She got up and smiled at me. That gleam of excitement was back in her eyes again. “Go ahead and take a hot shower. Get comfortable, and then we’ll get started.”
I grabbed a change of clothes, a pair of jogging pants and a T-shirt and went to the bathroom, taking my bottle of beer with me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
After the long, hot shower and the three beers, I was relaxed. The room was cool and the TV was off. I sat down in one of the two wooden and upholstered chairs in the dining and writing area between the two beds and the door that led outside. Alicia sat on the edge of the bed.
“Don’t make me cluck like a chicken,” I joked.
Alicia didn’t laugh.
“Wait,” I said. I got up and went to my duffel bag. I pulled out a cigarette lighter I’d bought at the 7-11. “Here,” I said as I handed it to Alicia. “Just in case you need it.”
She nodded and set the lighter on the dresser with the TV bolted to the top of it. “Uh, I brought something with me from home.” She got up and went to her duffel bag.
“What?”
She pulled out a Taser, showing it to me. “I bought it for self-defense. It’s the kind where the electrodes shoot out.”
A shiver sang through my body. God, I hoped to hell she wouldn’t have to use that thing on me.
“For absolute emergencies,” she said and set it down next to the cigarette lighter.
I wanted to tell her to please use the lighter before the Taser, but I didn’t. I sat back down in the chair, ready to begin our session.
Alicia began just like she had in my house earlier in the day (God, it felt like a week ago). “I want you to sit back and relax. You just had a hot shower and drank a few beers. You’re drowsy and totally relaxed now. You’re comfortable and you’re safe. Okay?”
I nodded.
“I want you to close your eyes and focus on your breathing.”
I did as she said, closing my eyes, feeling my lungs fill up with air and then slowly exhaling.
“You’re doing great. You’re safe and nothing is going to happen to you. Breathe in deeply and then breathe back out.”
I did. I could feel the tension easing out of my body.
“Yes, you are relaxing slowly, edging towards sleep, but you’re not going fully to sleep. You will hear my voice at all times. When I count down from ten you will become totally relaxed and safe. Okay?”
I nodded and muttered agreement.
“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . you’re in that pool again, floating on the raft.”
I saw myself in my friend’s pool again. Nobody was home—I had the house to myself. I was floating on the inflatable raft, and this time I had a bottle of beer in the little cup holder to my right. My feet were in the water as I drifted along. The sky so blue above me, birds tweeting.
“Seven . . . six . . . five . . .”
The scene around me felt more real, and suddenly I was there in that pool, not in the motel room anymore. I didn’t even hear her count down to one.
*
It seemed like I’d only been out for a few seconds. I remembered floating in my friend’s pool, relaxed as Alicia counted down from ten.
And then she was counting up instead of counting down.
“You’re going to come fully awake when I snap my fingers. Eight . . . nine . . . ten.”
Snap.
My eyes opened, but I had the feeling that my eyes had already been opened, like a veil was lifted, my sight suddenly cleared, everything coming into focus with a jarring shift. For just a second I felt sick, like I’d been riding a roller coaster that had suddenly screeched to a halt.
Alicia stared at me with concern. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked away, wanting to avert her gaze. She looked scared again, but there was something else in her eyes: she loo
ked dejected, defeated. “It didn’t work, did it?”
She shook her head. “No. You can rewind the video if you want to.”
I got up from the chair. I needed to move. After being under someone else’s control so completely, I needed to prove to myself that I was in control. I picked up the camera and pressed the STOP button. I started the footage over again, backing up to where Alicia counted down to one and snapped her fingers.
As I watched the small screen on the video camera, Alicia went to the other bed and got under the covers. The air conditioner had cooled the room off quite a bit while I’d been under hypnosis, and now it was starting to get a little chilly.
I knew I should go and turn the A/C up, but I didn’t. I turned out all of the lights and sat down on the edge of the other bed and watched the screen on the camera. Even with the lights off and the blinds drawn, lights from outside in the courtyard invaded the room and made it easy enough to see in the dark.
I set up the four fluffy pillows on my bed, positioning them behind me so I could sit against them. The surf on the beach outside was a constant and somewhat soothing background noise.
“Do you remember when Michelle hypnotized you?” Alicia asked me on the video screen.
“Michelle never hypnotized me,” I answered.
I watched the little screen on the video camera, watching someone who wasn’t me. It was like watching an alien who had taken over my mind and body, doing its best to imitate me, but not getting every nuance down right, fooling most, but not me. That wasn’t me. That couldn’t be me.
“Are you supposed to do something right now?” Alicia asked me.
“Not that I know of,” I answered.
“Do you have orders to hurt someone?”
“No,” I snapped at her. “I wouldn’t hurt someone. Why would you ask me that?”
I looked antsy on the video, appalled, like I was about to storm out of the room, offended by Alicia’s questions.
“I’m sorry,” Alicia said quickly. “I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t ever hurt anyone.”
“Well, I wouldn’t.”
“Where is Michelle, Zach?”
“She left me last Friday night. We went to a restaurant. She went to the bathroom, and then she never came to the table.”
“She left?”
“Yes. With a man. An old lady saw her leave.”
“Why do you think she left you?”
“I don’t know. I talked to her friend at work, Kendra, and she said Michelle was afraid of me.”
“Do you know why she was afraid of you?”
I scrunched my face a little like I was confused. “I don’t know. I started sleepwalking recently. Maybe that scared her.”
As I watched, I thought Alicia might ask why Michelle had called earlier tonight to warn me to stop digging, or that she might mention my meeting with Stan’s friends who lived in their RV. But she didn’t. She seemed nervous, like she didn’t want to push too far this early. Maybe she was afraid I would snap any second.
I started fidgeting in the chair, looking around like I wasn’t sure why I was in a motel room. “What are we doing here? Where’s Stan?”
“Zach, I think we’re done talking, okay?”
I just stared at her.
“Remember when you were floating in your friend’s pool? I want you to go back there.”
I was still just staring at her.
“Please close your eyes and try to relax,” Alicia said.
I was beginning to get nervous, afraid I was going to do or say something to her, but then I saw myself on the video screen close my eyes and relax.
“Breathe in deeply and let it out slowly,” Alicia said to me.
I did as she told me to.
She started counting up from one.
I closed the view on the camera, shutting it off. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the room. I set the camera on the table between our two beds. I stretched out, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning unit and the distant roar of the surf. Somewhere a car horn blared. Two people walked by outside our door on the balcony, a man and a woman. Both of them were talking loud and sounded drunk, the woman laughing at something the man said.
Their banter and laughter made me think about the rest of the beers in the mini-fridge. I thought about drinking all of them. Getting drunk. But I needed to get up early. We had things to do.
“The suggestions and triggers are buried deep,” Alicia said from the other bed.
I looked over at her; she was just a slender lump under the covers. She looked so small.
“It would take a while to peel back those layers,” she added.
“But it can be done?”
“It would need to be done in a safe space. Trust would need to be built up.”
She hadn’t really answered my question, and I decided not to ask again.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep within minutes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
A thumping noise woke me up. It was still dark in the motel room.
I sat up quickly and looked around. It was easy enough to see in the murky room with the lights from outside filtering in through the blinds over the windows.
The thump sounded again.
I looked at the door. It was ajar, opening just a bit and then closing again, thumping against the doorframe, catching on the safety latch.
I looked at the other bed. Alicia was gone.
Where did she go? Did she take off in the middle of the night and leave the door open? My skin crawled—something didn’t feel right.
“Alicia?” I called out as I got out of bed. I didn’t turn on any lights as I went around the foot of my bed, then in front of hers, and then to the bathroom door. The door was ajar, just like the motel room door. I knocked on the door even though it was slightly open. I called her name again.
No answer.
I knew she wasn’t in the bathroom, but I checked just to be sure.
She wasn’t in there. She was gone.
I slipped my sneakers on and ran outside onto the walkway, staring down at the courtyard below. I shuffled down the concrete steps and hurried through the path that meandered through the grass and shrubs. I got to the parking area and saw my pickup truck parked right next to Alicia’s Toyota.
Her car was still there.
Maybe she had gone for a walk on the beach, or she’d gone down to the pool area to stare at the ocean.
With the floodlights and landscape lighting, it was bright enough for me to make my way easily to the breezeway and then through it to the deck area. The pool and lounge chairs and a few concrete tables and benches with straw roofs over them were down below the deck. The pool lights were still on, along with landscaping spotlights. But I didn’t see anyone down there. I didn’t see Alicia. The ever-present wind from the ocean was blowing the palm fronds around, the waves crashing relentlessly against the beach.
I hurried down the steep set of concrete steps to the pool area, then to the metal gate that led down to the beach.
Thirty feet away I saw someone on the beach.
Alicia?
It had to be.
A few seconds later I was racing across the sand, getting closer to Alicia. She was doing something on the beach, not even noticing that I was coming. I heard the scraping sounds of the work she was doing, metal slicing against sand.
She was digging a hole in the beach, working hard at it, focused on her job.
“Alicia!”
She didn’t even turn my way—she kept at her work.
When I got to her, she had discarded the shovel and got down on her hands and knees, reaching down into the shallow hole she had dug, brushing sand away from the body buried there.
The body was Stan.
Stan’s eyes snapped open, crusted with sand. He opened his mouth and spoke: “Stop digging. Stop digging, Zach.”
My eyes popped open in the early-morning light. I sat up in bed, breathing hard. I look
ed over at Alicia’s bed. She was gone. Then I heard the same thumping noise I’d heard in my dream. I looked at the motel room door and it was opening.
Alicia stepped inside with a paper bag and two paper cups of coffee in a cardboard cup holder. She smiled at me, then froze. “You okay?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“You just wake up?”
I nodded.
“Bad dream?” she asked as she set the coffees down and closed and locked the door.
“Yeah,” I mumbled as I got out of bed. I needed to pee, and I was still groggy. I stumbled off to the bathroom.
A few moments later I was back. I had splashed some water in my eyes and felt a little better.
Alicia handed me the other cup of coffee. “I thought you might need this. There’s a bagel and some cream cheese in the bag. Creamers and sugar, too. Got it all at the 7-11 across the street.”
“Thanks,” I said. “What time is it?”
“A little after seven.”
I set my cup of coffee down and took the lid off, adding one creamer and one packet of sugar, stirring it with one of the plastic spoons in the bag.
“What were you dreaming about?”
I just shook my head. “Just a nightmare. Did I talk in my sleep?”
“Not that I heard,” she said.
I looked at the video camera; it was right where I’d left it, on the small dresser between the two beds. I needed to charge it up. I wasn’t sure if it would film in the darkness of the room, but at least it would catch any audio. “Did I get up and . . .” I let my words die away.
“No. I don’t think so. I woke up a few times and you were sleeping.”
I sipped my coffee; it was helping to wake me up. “I wonder why I didn’t walk in my sleep last night.”
She shrugged. “Maybe the trigger was coming from somewhere in your house. It could have been a particular sound, like a chime or a bell, a sound planted in your subconscious over the years. Or maybe it came from your phone.”
The phone made sense to me. I was relieved I hadn’t gotten up in the middle of the night.