And why, exactly, were they exhausting the Agency's resources overseeing this personally? Usually the computer managed the social-distress protocols.
It was complicated.
Karen fell back exhausted into the couch relaxing at last, the headache finally relenting. It was the first moment she'd had in three days without the constant, pounding pain behind her forehead. She'd gone through five bottles of different pills, but none of them had done her any good.
The pain always announced itself with uncontrollably horrible thoughts that came to her against her will—the worst things possible. She imagined herself killing Emmanuel, she imagined killing herself. She had visions of people being tortured, visions of fingers and toes chopped off with sharp knives, had seen rapes and mutilations, witnessed uncountable terrifying violations of her mind's eye. There was no getting away from it, no escaping the inner TV. It didn't have an off-switch, and it was always horrifically violent. For three whole days.
Emmanuel was a lucky man, had no idea how lucky he actually was, not to have a pair of scissors lodged between his ribs, snipping important tubes connected to his heart.
Jaime had tried to tell his parents about the two men in the van that followed him on his way to school, he honestly had.
He tried to tell his parents about it but he had nothing to show them and, of course, they hadn't believed him. No one ever believed him about anything, and so he'd stopped long ago trying to tell them—not about the funny little man with the big eyes who said he was a friend but hurt him with strange lights, not about the lizard people, not about the skinless lady made of lightning who talked to him about things he couldn't remember. No one believed him about how he went flying at night, about how he made the magnets at school non-sticky just by playing with them, about how batteries died when he touched them, none of it. It was a terrible burden for one little boy alone, and no one missed the opportunity to remind him that he was alone with it.
The nightmares had started when he was four years old. In them, the monster was usually hidden behind bright white lights and made him do strange things in his sleep, before taking something away from him that he couldn't remember but missed achingly. Something very wrong, something that he knew he needed.
He had the same nightmare, every night, for three weeks running, and then it suddenly stopped. His brothers teased him mercilessly about it, though he was unable to make it stop. The next string of bad dreams were about being pulled through the wall and taken to the metal room, where horrible people did bad things to him that he couldn't remember. He always had nightmares.
Sometimes he had nightmares that happened during the day, when he was awake.
Like the time he saw the invisible person at his school, running across the playground faster than anybody could, like a bolt of clear lightning. It had stopped and turned to face him, staring at it open-mouthed through the window in his classroom; it waved a hand at him and Jaime became suddenly aware that he was surrounded by the invisible beings, and then it had gone.
Jaime had been removed screaming and stayed home for three whole days; this was when he started being taken to the doctors. And his parents were crazy for the doctors; they couldn't get enough of them, he was always in one doctor's office or another, treating his ADD or his asthma or crooked teeth. He had a handful of different pills he had to take every morning, just to try to be normal.
No one knew what was wrong with Jaime, or what he was seeing.
The first doctor they'd taken him to was the nicest.
He'd given him a comfortable chair and talked to him the whole time in a calm, slow voice. At one point he'd said, "I'd like to try a little light hypnosis," but then Jaime didn't remember anything after that because he'd fallen asleep. When he went back for his next visit a week later, the doctor had a little wood-paneled radio that he sat down before the boy, telling Jaime to turn it on only after he'd left the room. He'd waited until the doctor left and then switched it on just as he'd been shown; the radio set made no sound other than a very quiet hiss. He sat back in the chair and waited patiently, but nothing seemed to be happening, and so he fell asleep. Jaime seemed to sleep a lot when he went to see the talking doctor.
The next doctor he went to was not so nice. Jaime didn't like the way the man put his hands on the back of his neck and pressed, sliding the bones around into painful positions. He tried to tell his parents that he didn't like going to the painful doctor, cried and pleaded with them not to make him go, but they refused to let him get out of it. It was an adjustment he'd learned to accept.
The pain was familiar to him by the time he went on the field trip to the aquarium with the entire fifth grade. It was weird, seeing so many kids in one place, herded around like farm animals. It had almost been enough to distract him from all the rest of the strange happenings going on around him.
It hurt to turn his head so much, trying to take in all the sights and make sense of the unusual circumstances; at least half of it didn't make sense. There were people dressed in costumes, but only a small number of them belonged to the aquarium; most of them were characters from the theme park across town. There wasn't any good reason for them to be at this park. And there were a whole bunch of men in black suits, way more than seemed normal, and none of them had kids with them. Something about the men in suits made Jaime nervous; it seemed like they were all staring at him from behind their dark sunglasses. One of them saw Jaime watching him and took a step toward the boy, speaking into a mouthpiece and reaching purposefully into his jacket as if he was going to pull out a gun or something, but then the tour had started.
Their first stop was the dolphin tank. Jaime wanted to watch the dolphins leaping to take the fish from the trainers' hands, but the pain in his neck wouldn't let him make any sudden movements with his head. The other children clapped and cheered every time the splash announced another successful performance, but Jaime's eyes stayed glued to the giant metal plate in the floor on which they all stood.
But wait—another moment, and Jaime noticed that it was only the kids and the lolly-gaggers who were standing on the metal—the men in suits and the aquarium staff were all pushed off to the sides of the room, watching from a safe distance. Jaime wanted to move over by them, to separate himself from the crowd; a disaster certainly was about to happen. He had images of the glass wall of the tank breaking, drowning them all beneath a freezing tidal wave full of predators, of the floor beneath them opening like a giant mouth and dumping him into a tank full of sharks, and of a jellyfish that attached itself over his head.
He didn't think he could be the only one made so uncomfortable by the looming tank full of danger; looking around, he saw one kid that he thought he recognized―but how could he? How could he have felt the stab of recognition, that he'd seen and done things, important things, with this kid he'd probably never actually met before in real life? He could have been anybody or nobody, except that he was somehow so familiar. It was impossible; this kid hadn't come with his class, was at least a couple years younger than him, but he felt like an older brother, if that wasn't too weird to believe. He was short, with light sandy brown hair and brown eyes that pressed into his brain, dressed in hand-me-downs like him...but he really just looked like any other kid in the world.
And then the dreadful imposition began again, and Jaime forgot all about the other boy.
The nightmarish visions were intense, impossible to ignore, and Jaime found that he wasn't the only one not at peace with his thoughts—the rest of his classmates, to a one, squirmed uncomfortably in their places, were staring blankly straight ahead with expressions of dread openly displayed on their faces. The animals swam past the glass in front of them, but no one gasped and no one sighed, the room gone dull and spiritless. Something hummed.
He watched while two of the worst kids in his class (a couple of jerks, they were always mean to him for reasons he couldn't figure) changed in front of him, their eyes becoming like steel BB's and their limbs locked in rigid
positions, and a terrible daydream of marionette-puppets flickered behind his eyelids. He blinked and looked again, but whatever transformation had taken them over was gone again just as quickly and now they looked tired more than anything.
The bottoms of his feet itched, and whenever the horrible daydreams were at their strongest, the itching was impossible to ignore. Jaime couldn't take it any more; the pain in his neck and the general discomfort, the noxious stink of fish and hundreds of young children and their spectacle, the generalized feeling of missing out, someone's face that he'd already forgotten. It was all just too much. Eleven years old was too young to feel like this, wasn't it? He didn't want to be here anymore.
William didn't know why the other kid seemed so familiar to him, or why the boy was supposed to forget about him, or how he'd done it; he'd made eye-contact and felt the same shock of recognition, but then looked away to a spot above the boy's shoulder and the spell had been broken. The electricity had built and then faded away. It was not to be.
And anyway, he had his parents to ditch. He managed to slip away while several of the dolphin handlers orchestrated an elaborately-choreographed trick, the audience applauding and all attention focused on the performance. They were too busy fighting, anyway; why should they notice his absence? He wouldn't be gone long, just long enough..
William ducked behind a velvet rope when no one was looking and disappeared down a long, dark hallway. He didn't know where he was going, nor did he really care—he just wanted to find out what was around the next corner. Stairs went down somewhere deep below; he followed them and left his parents very much behind.
The stairway ended at a T-junction and there were voices coming from the right-hand passage. William looked to the left and had second thoughts about his escape plan, seeing a hall even darker and spookier than where he'd just been, but there were lights and people the other direction and it was still much too early to get caught out. He swallowed back his fear, took one last look down the forbidding passage and stepped deeper into the dark. There wasn't anything to see for a long while; the passage had running lights up along the ceiling, but otherwise everything was shadowed and there were no doors or other exits or anything to make it interesting. William was about to turn back when the voices behind him suddenly got louder and a bright light shone on his backside, casting his long shadow before him. He had just enough time to consider running away, when they shouted harshly at him and footfalls closed the distance between them.
A hand seized him by the shoulder. "Hey kid, shouldn't you be in school?"
When he answered, "I'm here with my parents," one of them struck him across the face and flashed a bright light in his eyes. He wouldn't have remembered even that much if it hadn't been for what happened later.
They'd led him by the hand back to his robot-like parents, who by now had stopped fighting and moved on to the next viewing area. This room was also set with a giant metal plate in the floor on which William was made to stand; there was a 'click!' that was followed by a buzzing hum and then a creeping sensation layering some kind of sticky heat on top of him. Whatever it was that crawled up from the floor and crept over his skin, it was bad, like a swarm of insects threatening to bite. The crawling rose above his neck and started to invade his nose and ears. And something in William shut down and turned off.
With nothing of his conscious mind butting in to tell him that it couldn't be done, William adjusted the fine contours of his electrical body; wherever the creeping field of static charge issuing from the floor tried to overtake his own natural fields, William's body defended itself and repulsed the attack. The mechanism hadn't been designed to handle such conditions, and the oscillating inductance fields caused an imbalanced cascade of dirty electricity that fried the guts of the terrible device. William was entirely unaware of what he'd done.
When he snapped out of his daze, it was to find the rest of the aquarium similarly disoriented, his parents calling to him across the chaos of adults trying to assemble and herd the schoolkids out of the room. Sirens were going off everywhere and the interiors were all lit up with blinding floodlights; heavy metal plates slid down on rollers and covered the glass walls of the tanks, and it was obvious that the field trip was over. The men in suits ran around busily; William couldn't understand why they looked so angrily at him, or why they didn't seem to notice the invisible person standing in the middle of the room. They all ran around it, avoiding the space where it was, but showed no other sign of recognition. It was too weird.
The invisible man looked exactly like it was staring at him; William watched the hulking outline stand motionless and then disappear all of a sudden with a quick sideways movement. Once it was gone, something in the atmosphere of the place changed, and the men in suits quickly seemed very interested in the area where it had just been. One of them went over and waved something around that looked kind of like a phone, but then William's mother moved him along with a firm, guiding grip on his shoulder and the last of the spell of confusion was broken.
Something terrible had been barely avoided, and now it was time to go back to boring.
The rest of the year went by and everyone else around him seemed a little more dead inside, slightly more accustomed to things getting worse, a little more ready for whatever disaster would be next to strike.
He was in a train yard; it was dark, and he was not alone. These thoughts were terrifying by themselves—none of them fit with his most recent memories—but together they were more disjointed, scary, indicative of a total lapse in continuity. The last he'd been able to piece together, he was going to try and see Ella again for some reason—had he been in the hospital? Had the doctors been at him again? Scott was at a loss for where he was supposed to be, what he was supposed to be doing; he reached up to touch his face, to investigate the source of the pain there, and found the right side covered with tape and gauze. There was some kind of nightmare about the poking rod, and then blissful darkness—a rhythmic clattering would not let him rest. What was it?
His one good eye didn't want to open; it felt like it had been shut for days and left to crust over with old weeping. It was no surprise he should have been crying—when he could see at last, he found he was covered in blood. He knew that most of it wasn't his. The clattering grew louder, and he realized why he was there—what he was supposed to do.
There was a body. He was to switch clothes with it, put the wallet in the pocket and put the body on the train. The rest of it would take care of itself. All he had to do was to jam it up under the grill-work between two of the freight cars hard enough so it would stay, long enough for the train to get out of the station and it would be reported as an accident. No one would look any deeper than that. Easy–peasey, even with only one good eye.
Scott disposed of the body, and then another, and went back out into the night, intent upon finding his woman and reconnecting with his love.
Ella spat out the stranger's penis and wondered what she was doing. How had she gotten here?
It wasn't like she'd never sucked a dick before, you ended up doing all kinds of things you'd never thought you'd do when you had a habit, but this was the only one she didn't remember putting in her mouth…… Wasn't it?
And how the hell had she gotten here?
There were drugs involved, of course, but this wasn't her usual type of trap-house and this guy wasn't her usual coke-daddy. She felt like this was something she wasn't supposed to remember. She couldn't make out his face either, despite being no more than a few inches away from him; nothing she looked at would stay in focus, the world a dissolving blur around her. She'd had similar episodes of hysterical blindness as a young girl, somewhere around the same time the bad things started happening and her whole world first went to hell. She'd tried to tell her mother about it, and she didn't believe her. Didn't believe her!
What was it she wasn't supposed to remember?
After cousin Nathan had started raping her on their summer vacations, sex didn't seem
like the big deal that her classmates made it out to be. It was messy and it hurt like hell, it made her feel dirty and ashamed—nothing like what the girls at school hinted at. It didn't change her whole world for the better, or make her feel older and more mature. It was nothing special like that.
But there had been others before Nathan, hadn't there? Everything was so grayed-out.
The boys she ended up dating from the army base all expected it. It was easy to give away, and while she was giving it she felt wanted. For that little while, she was again something special. She ended up spending a lot of time on base.
What was it...?
"Hey, what the hell? Why is she stopping? What the fuck is wrong with you, bitch? I told you this one was too old!"
"You didn't shock her enough, asshole. Clear!"
Sudden, white-hot pain spread over the back of her neck and she bit down into the body sitting in the chair in front of her. Cruel laughter came from all around the room and as she blacked out into the lap of the man spasming before her, she wished briefly that someone, at least one person in the whole wide world, loved her enough to protect her from the bad people.
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