The Sentient Mimic (The Sentient Trilogy Book 2)

by Ian Williams

  Phoenix then realised it was much worse than she had thought a moment ago. They were no longer talking to Ninety-three.

  Chapter 7

  What bad dreams are made of

  With her gun hovering roughly in the direction of Ninety-three’s face, Phoenix listened intently. She could not decide what to do next. He was sitting before her and speaking like a perfectly normal human. Except this was someone different to the presence she had met the day before. Her first reaction to discovering Ninety-three was in fact a Sentient had been fear and hate. Now she did not know what to feel. A fate worse than death had befallen the human owner of the body.

  “Do you know who you are?” she asked, half expecting no answer at all.

  “My name’s Jack.” He swallowed hard. “Jack Hudson. Please don’t let him take over again. I can’t bear it anymore.” He sat slumped in the chair, looking timid and in constant terror. The slightest touch, however gentle, appeared to cause great pain to him. She could only imagine what the poor bastard had been through. Did he even know what happened while Ninety-three was in control of the body?

  “Calm down Jack, we’ll do what we can,” Rhys said, doing his best to ease Jack’s mind. In truth they could only keep him awake for as long as it was safe to. Phoenix had no clue how long they had, but she was sure it was not going to be as long as Jack wanted.

  “What do you remember last, Jack?” This time it was Phoenix’s turn.

  He licked his cracked lips to alleviate the dryness. “The tosser who takes over doesn’t understand thirst or hunger. I don’t think he feels the pain it causes. I haven’t eaten in two days. Christ, my side is killing me.”

  Rhys gestured to Phoenix to take the black Magnetic Stimulator paddle from him. She took it without question as he left the room, to raid their fridge for whatever leftovers were there, she guessed. Although against her better judgement she placed the submachine gun down on a side table and used both hands to keep the paddle’s magnetic field close to the black box on Jack’s head. She guessed that the moment it was removed the Sentient inside – tentatively named Ninety-three – would take control once more.

  “Jack, do you know how you ended up like this?” she asked, much more carefully than before. If he did remember, she was pretty confident he would not enjoy telling her his horrific story. Unfortunately, there was little she could do about that, she had to know.

  In the background she could hear Rhys and Matt exchanging heated words between each other. She knew Matt was taking the chance to vent his anger at her arrival, maybe even to try and change Rhys’ mind altogether. Whatever the reason, she was glad to hear the discussion had been resolved quickly. That or Rhys had just put his foot down.

  “I was out with friends, for the evening,” Jack began, with another lick of his lips. “I remember being grabbed by a bunch of guys. They put a sack, or something, over my head. I couldn’t see anything as they dragged me away.”

  Rhys came back into the room carrying a plate with half a ham sandwich and an already unwrapped chocolate bar sat on top. What he had in his other hand, however, was really what Jack wanted. The moment he saw Rhys with a glass of water he began to reach for it like a greedy alcoholic desperate for just one more sip.

  “Drink this slowly, OK?” Rhys said as he handed it over. “You’re badly dehydrated, so take it easy for now.”

  “Thanks,” Jack replied, before ignoring the warning completely and downing the whole glass without a breath in between. After finishing that, he dug straight into the sandwich, which did not look to be particularly fresh. He clearly cared little about freshness and devoured it in only two cheek swelling bites, leaving butter and mayonnaise in the corners of his mouth.

  Pulling Phoenix to the side, Rhys had a worrying message to whisper into her ear.

  “I can’t keep him awake for much longer. You need to get what you can out of him quickly,” he said. When he moved away he shot her a stern look to confirm the seriousness of the situation, and the impending betrayal. Jack was definitely not going to like what was coming. But there was nothing they could do, they had to put him under again, or risk injuring him even more.

  Taking this on board, Phoenix again returned to her task of prising Jack’s memory of his apparent abduction free from his muddled mind. So while he continued to snack, this time on the chocolate bar, she resumed her questioning.

  “Jack, after you were taken, what else can you remember? Do you know where they took you?”

  Now joining the butter and mayonnaise on the edge of Jack’s mouth were chocolate crumbs, which fell away as he spoke with his mouth still full. “No idea. I think they drugged me or something, I can’t think straight. I did hear them speaking later, but I couldn’t see a thing still.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Something about,” he took another bite of his snack before continuing on, “they were talking about the others they’d captured. It sounded like they’d been doing the same thing for months.”

  “Did you feel anything while they attached that black box to your head?”

  Jack stopped chewing and stared ahead. When he finally blinked, a single tear ran down his face. It soon mixed with the food debris around his mouth.

  “I couldn’t feel the pain, they numbed me.” He kept his eyes fixed in place as he spoke of his harrowing experience. “But I could still feel something going through my head, the vibrations were almost unbearable. I blacked out after that.” As though he had shaken the thought off, he returned to eating and talking. “Look, can we stop for a minute, my head is pounding.”

  Phoenix looked to Rhys, who remained to the side. He had the same stern look as before. Evidently the headache was a sign that they needed to wrap things up with Jack, for the time being at least.

  “In a minute, sorry Jack,” Phoenix said with a hand on his shoulder. She squeezed reassuringly. It was difficult lying to him all the time. “The man that took over your body, what do you know about him?”

  He sighed. “I can sometimes hear his thoughts, like I’m almost awake. Then it goes black again. It’s as if I’m permanently trapped in a nightmare that I just can’t wake up from. Whoever he is he isn’t human, I know that for certain. He talks to himself sometimes like he’s never had his own body. Is this what it would be like to be possessed?”

  Even though she knew his question had been rhetorical she answered anyway. “If you were, we’d be the ones to exorcise whatever demon had control over you.”

  “Thank you.” Jack clamped his eyes shut and clenched his fists as the pain returned. “Fuck, my head’s really hurting.”

  “That’s it, we’re out of time,” Rhys suddenly said beside them.

  Jack spun around to face them both, his expression now more desperate than before. “What? No. You can’t. Please, you promised.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phoenix replied, as she pulled the Magnetic Stimulator paddle away.

  “I’d rather die!” Jack managed to shout.

  The paddle fell to her feet with a thud.

  She had to face the other way as he fell silent once more. The onslaught of emotions immediately got the better of her, forcing a stinging build-up of tears behind her eyes. Rather than stay and wait for Ninety-three to return, she left the room and head straight for the exit. She passed Matt along the way, but refused to acknowledge his presence at all. She needed fresh air, and not the stale, re-circulated kind flowing around Rhys’ apartment.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Matt called out while she sped through the curtained door.

  The heavy metal door refused to open, which only increased her frustration further. After bashing it with her palms she eventually gave up. Trapped inside, she turned and leaned her sweaty back against the cold steel. She slid to the ground, where she rested, knees supporting her head.

  Tricking Jack had made her insides burn with rage. The Sentient inside him would pay the minute he returned. She was determined to deal a justified punishment, and removing Nine
ty-three completely had to be the only way. What he had said about the tower and Graham being alive now looked like a lie anyway. He could not be trusted at all. None of them could.

  She thought about Jack’s short but revealing comments. He had overheard those responsible, possibly while somewhere important to them. If that had been where they were carrying out the installation of Sentients in human bodies, then there was a chance the origin of it could be found, with Jack’s help. When it was safe again, she intended on bringing him back. She did not care at all about speaking to the Sentient inside him again. That thing had had its chance already.

  Even more of a concern was what Jack had said about the others who had gone through the same ordeal as he had. If he was right then that spelt disaster for the rest of society. How many were walking around the city? Were they all carrying out whatever plan the Sentients inside them had set out? So far the only others she had seen were guarding the remains of Sanctuary.

  So where were the rest of them?

  * * *

  Staring directly ahead at a doorway blocked by red house bricks, Graham could hardly believe what he was seeing. Only seconds earlier he and Alex were racing toward it expecting to step through and on to the outside world. It had never been anything other than an exit, until now. For a second he thought he might have taken a wrong turn while walking through the grounds of his old school. Checking behind him proved that was not the case.

  Even all these years later he could roughly remember what should have been behind the oddly out of place brick wall blocking his route. This door was at the back and opened out onto a secluded part of the playground, a good place for the cool kids to hide their misdeeds. He had always been quite naïve about this as a teenager and could never really confess to what these misdeeds actually were; either drinking or Nicotine inhalers, he never found out.

  “We have to run much, much faster to beat the changes,” the young Alex said from behind him. It may have been her voice, but they were certainly not her words.

  He turned his back on the wall and allowed the door to slowly close behind him. This had been yet another dead end where none should have existed. “How do these things keep popping up like this? I thought this was all based on my memories?”

  “They are, Graham,” the being in Alex’s form had at least stopped calling him ‘Daddy’. “But this place doesn’t want us to go away. To find a way out of this maze thingy we have to trick it.”

  “How the hell do we do that then? Every time we’ve tried we’ve ended up stuck.”

  Alex began looking around for something he could barely even guess about. She went to each wall and pushed without any success. Next to be checked was the old, scuffed, red carpet he had dragged his feet along many times during his time there as a spotty adolescent. When this also failed to give up any clue as to what she was looking for, she began to walk back along the corridor.

  “Come on, follow me,” she said.

  “Where?”

  Alex took the corner without replying. It had been this way since they left the bar earlier. Every time Graham believed they were getting somewhere, they were soon stopped by something that simply should not have been there. From doors blocked off by a wall, to doors not even appearing at all. Rather than explain, Alex had continued to react and plan ahead each time this had happened.

  He was quickly becoming fed-up with this arrangement.

  The last thing he wanted was for her to get too far ahead of him, so he picked up his pace and fought on. Around the corner he saw that his companion had stopped and decided to investigate a broom cupboard on the left. He paused for a moment too, before peering in, only to find her searching the area for something hidden.

  Opposite the broom cupboard was a stretch of chest high glass that looked in to an ongoing lesson. Inside were teenagers in the middle of a Design and Technology class, all wearing aprons as they cut, drilled, sawed or glued bits of wood. They were in his memory after all, so he was hardly surprised when he spotted himself and a young Elliot pissing about behind the teacher’s back as usual.

  He was allowed a short while to enjoy this before the present once again flooded back in. Alex knocked over a mop, which had stood in the corner of the small closet.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Here it is. This may look a bit odd.”

  “You mean it hasn’t so far?”

  This time there was not even a smile in return. Alex was at least consistent at ignoring his questions. She was not exaggerating either as what she did next defied all logic. Where there was nothing but sticky grey vinyl flooring she began to pull on a small golden handle that he knew for a fact was not supposed to be there. With this she pulled open a trapdoor that tore effortlessly into the flooring with a sound similar to separating Velcro.

  “Are you coming or not?” she asked while taking the first step into the underworld. She was gone before he answered. On the other side of the open trapdoor he found a wooden staircase descending into the dark, and Alex looking back up at him. “Of course it’s safe, silly. Hurry up.”

  “Sure,” he replied. He could not remember asking whether or not it was safe – at least aloud.

  He hesitated with his right foot hovering just above the first step. Landing his foot down was going to take some effort on his part, he knew, as however many times Alex had told him these things were safe, he still could not accept it without question. He closed his eyes as he leaned forward, and to his relief his foot touched-down on the wooden step without any unexpected results.

  Choosing to leave the trapdoor open behind him proved a good decision, as the darkness was quickly swooping in the further he progressed. By now Alex had already reached the bottom and waited for him with an impatient tapping of her feet, just like his real daughter used to do. He went against his better judgement and took the steps quicker to catch up.

  Then the darkness below was gone, replaced instantly by a square opening. A dusty beam of light, from what he assumed was the afternoon sun, shined past. Once he made it to the opening he could see that the wooden staircase had now become a ladder, extending out to the floor. He recognised the place straight away. It was his parents’ old apartment. Somehow they had gone from his school, taken a staircase through the floor and ended up coming out of a loft hatch. They had bypassed the loft entirely, with all of the clutter his family once kept up there too.

  The hall was lit by a large window at the end, which he could see was indeed letting the warm sunlight in. The ladder creaked while he carefully transitioned to the floor with a final jump – it had never reached all of the way.

  “I loved watching the moonlight bouncing around this hallway as a kid,” Graham said. “The shadows from the tree outside used to make shapes that would dance through the window. I’d watch them for hours, until eventually falling asleep. The best kind of nightlight in my opinion.”

  “Quick, we shouldn’t be here too long,” Alex called from his old bedroom. She had missed his moment of reminiscence completely.

  “What are you doing in there?” he shouted back.

  Every cupboard door was open, every drawer had been emptied and yet she continued to pull at his old possessions without a care. The room had been ransacked by a tiny whirlwind, it seemed. This time she found what she wanted inside his childhood walk-in closet.

  “You have to stop thinking of these places as real,” she said, her head lost inside the hanging clothes. “They aren’t. They’re just part of the maze.”

  “You keep calling it a maze, why?”

  She stopped and looked back at him. Thankfully it appeared she had now seen that he would be more compliant with some form of an answer. Sitting on his old toy box, she began to explain. “But that’s what it is, a maze. We’re trapped inside, looking for a way out someone else has hidden.”

  He found this statement odd and had to pick her up on it. “If that’s true then who designed it? And how are we both trapped inside?”

>   “Why are you asking me? Only the person who made it can answer that. It’s like a great big springy toy; when we pull it too hard it snaps back again. But we’re not getting out while you’re asking so many questions, so…”

  While he dealt with her matter of fact, and possibly too blunt moment of honesty, Alex returned to searching the area. It did not take her long this time to find the next path. The back of the closet opened like they were taking a trip into Narnia. He was unsure whether this was a cruel trick by whoever had made the place, as one of his favourite books as a child had been The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. He had checked this wall on many occasions and was always left disappointed when it stayed in place. Never once did it ever turn into a set of doors in the way it had right in front of his eyes.

  The illusion was broken instantly when he saw where it led. Double doors of glass and metal were the normal way he entered the Simova building he used to work out of, not plaster wall cut-outs in the shape of a door. He was pulled through almost entirely by his own curiosity.

  Where was it going to take him next?

  Tending the reception desk, as he would expect, was the pretty girl in the red dress – her favourite colour by his reckoning. She smiled at him as he approached and then immediately moved on to the woman waiting to be dealt with. The two began to talk while he and Alex headed for the staircase at the end of the lobby.

  Either side of the stairs sat a door, each of which went on to the large server room he and Luke had broken into…

  “Shit!” he said aloud. As a memory he believed was all but lost until now steam-rolled back into his mind. He had to stop and think hard. It came to him completely out of context and without any of the events that had led to that day. Still he could see it clearly enough.

  Behind him he could hear the people going about their business as they would on any other day, but unexpectedly the noises ceased as he stepped away from the stairs. Those nearby had vanished entirely and outside it had switched to night almost without him noticing. Something was pulling him toward his last memory of this place, an inexplicable tug to see just one more scene from his past. Perhaps it was simply the comfort of the already known that was distracting him this time.