by Nick Thacker
SEEING RED
NICK THACKER
Copyright © 2017 by Nick Thacker, Turtleshell Press
Printed in the United States of America
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First Printing, 2017
Nick Thacker Colorado Springs, CO
www.NickThacker.com
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All rights reserved.
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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
The Enigma Strain
Prologue
Prologue
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Afterword
Also by Nick Thacker
About the Author
Acknowledgments
1
WANT to get to know Gareth Red?
Click here for a preview of The Enigma Strain, the first in the series featuring Gareth Red.
THE MOMENT HIT GARETH RED harder than anything he could remember. The suddenness of it, the change in… everything, really. His life, now, was no longer his own. It was no longer a world for him, designed to be his. He could no longer claim authority on his small slice of utopia; the moment had taken that from him.
This was all hers now. Just a simple word, really. One of two possible words, yet they held within them everything he ever cared about, and possibly more. One word, or the other.
And it had been the other.
The waiting room, the long silence, the magazines nearby full of empty promise. The clacking sound of the typist behind the counter, the smacking of her gum.
The quick creaking of the door as it swung inward, Gareth having to swing his own legs sideways to allow for it to pass by unobstructed.
He sniffed. They were waiting again, in another room, for another door to open. He had made sure his legs were safely out of reach of any swinging doors in this smaller room, and yet he still felt trapped. In danger of something he couldn’t quite place.
He wasn’t used to feeling this way. His training had mostly removed this feeling from his persona, replacing the fear with a heightened sense of awareness, a tool. He wielded this tool well, opting to run in when others might run out, using his tool for good.
But today, in this place, this sterile, dead place, he had no tools to use. The matters of the heart were more unknown to him, more strange. He couldn’t think his way out of this situation, but not for want of trying. He stood, stretched his legs, trying to work out kinks and aches that weren’t really there, then he sat back down.
She looked at him, then. Finally.
Her eyes were bleary, bloodshot. They weren’t angry, not anymore. But they weren’t satisfied, either. There was a story in them, a story he had written.
One word.
That’s all it had taken. The man had come in, asked them to tell their story, and then he’d taken out the instruments and devices that let them see her.
He had seen her.
One word was all it took. The man had said more, sure, but Gareth only heard the word.
“Girl.”
A single, lone word in a string of others, in a world of strange characters and odd sounds. He wasn’t hearing, not really, until that moment. In that moment, everything changed.
And he was in shock.
He stood up again, stretched again, sat back down again. She was still staring at him, pleading with him with everything she had save her voice.
He stared back. Alone. Afraid, for the first time in years.
The man wanted an answer, and he needed it soon. Within the hour, he’d said, but Gareth wasn’t sure if that meant they had an hour from the moment he’d left the room or fifteen minutes from now, when the old hour would roll into the new one and he’d be back.
It wouldn’t happen today, that’s what the man had said. They had time to think about it, to process it. To figure out, he’d said. But Gareth had long ago figured it out. He was done figuring, and he was now ready to make the decision and be done with it.
The problem, of course, was that he only wanted to make the decision if she chose the same decision as him. And she wasn’t going to budge on her end. He knew it, she knew it, and the man who’d come in to visit them knew it.
A girl.
He’d seen her with his own eyes, on the screen in that ugly lit-brown color similar to the illumination his “eye in the sky” team used sometimes to give him a target on the battlefield.
And this room was a different sort of battlefield. A new battlefield, one he’d never fought in or had any experience with before, and he knew that he was losing ground in this battle.
Everyone knew it. He wondered if the girl knew it, too.
He couldn’t look at her again. Forced his eyes down to the polished white tile floor where they wouldn’t accidentally disobey his orders and steal a glance. He examined the minuscule cracks where the tiles’ edges met, where they came together to form a perfect union and create a solid, impenetrable surface. For a moment, he wanted to be a tile.
No decision needed if you were a tile, just sit there all day and be stomped on by traffic and carts and rolling things that displayed brown backlit images. No decision to wake up the next day, or to go to sleep the night before, or to do anything at all.
He wanted that. In that moment, Gareth wanted that sort of simplicity for himself. It meant he wouldn’t have to be here, because there wouldn’t be any decision he could have made that would have taken him here in the first place.
She wouldn’t be here either, and he was okay with that. The girl — well, he didn’t want to look at her, so he was sure he didn’t want to think about her either.
But the only way to escape this place was with a decision. He’d made his, she’d made hers, and the man outside the room didn’t care one way or another, really. He’d come back in, ask them what they wanted to do, then leave again. Someone — maybe him, maybe another person altogether — would come back and tell them what was next either way. No matter what, the man would need a decision.
He shook his head.
Her eyes were boring into his side. Still he didn’t look up.
An ant crawled across the crack between the tiles, a monstrous crevice for the tiny creature, just a minuscule crack for Gareth.
He studied it. Did the ant have to make decisions?
He wondered if there was something instinctual about the decision he was making. Was there something inherent in him — inherent in all of them — that had guided his hand?
N
o.
If there was, they would both have reached the same conclusion, right? They’d both have landed on the same solution to the problem. Ants never argued, because they were guided by instinct, and instinct wasn’t one way in one ant and another way altogether in another ant.
The ant reached the next edge of the square tile, and he watched it as it stopped and tried to figure out which way it should go. Which way was the food? Or home? Those were probably the only motivating forces behind the ant’s progress, not an actual decision-making process that weighed the pros and cons of each possible outcome and chose one or the other.
He wanted to be the ant after he was done being the tile.
She wasn’t going to let him, though.
She had decided, and she was just giving him a bit of space to process it before she told him what they were going to do. She was still staring at him, waiting for him to be done playing tile and ant.
He sniffed again. Longer, deeper. With more intentionality. He felt the anger coming again. The pure, unadulterated anger. It wasn’t intense yet, but it would be. At some point soon, shortly after this string of moments, he would be angry.
She knew it, and he knew it. It was probably the one thing the man waiting outside didn’t know, and the ant and the tile wouldn’t have any way of knowing, either.
That gave him hope. The idea that somehow he could retain this knowledge, keep it from the rest of the world, locked up safe and tight until he — and only he — wanted to release it. It wasn’t much in the way of hope, but it was still hope. And he relished it. He held it tight to his chest when he swallowed, then looked up from the ant and the tile and into her eyes.
Those gorgeous eyes. Everything he’d ever known was nothing compared to what those eyes now knew, what they were trying to hide.
He’d fallen in love with those eyes, more than once even. And he could have again, if…
If.
There was no if, not any more. It was all over.
He stared into those eyes he no longer cared about, into the soul of a woman he wasn’t sure deserved one.
Finally, after four days of complete silence and wasted tears, he opened his mouth to speak.
There was a grumbling rust covering his vocal cords, and he did his best to clear it. His next words would be wasted, but they were still his. She couldn’t take that, too.
“It’s a —”
She held up her hand. Just a bit, barely off her knee.
But he saw it, and he knew what it meant.
Don’t say it, she was saying with that hand. Don’t even make me think it.
He nodded. Not out of respect, but out of a weakness he knew she shared. He didn’t want to say it.
And he hated himself for that.
After a long minute of silence, another minute that added nothing but more silence to the previous length of silent minutes, he stood.
Walked toward the door.
He cleared his throat, ready. Or so he thought.
He didn’t turn around. He couldn’t. He reached for the handle, turned it.
The man was there, waiting.
“Sometimes we just need to walk away, son.”
He wanted to punch him. Didn’t matter what he’d said, really, he just didn’t want him to say anything at all. But that? Of all things? What did it even mean? And how had he given the man the impression he wanted to be talked to? He brushed him off, ignoring him but also realizing he was essentially doing what he’d just been told to do. He would fight for this, but not here. Not now. It wouldn’t be a fight like any other — this one would take place in his mind.
He wouldn’t walk away from the fight.
Then Gareth walked out of the room.
It was the last time he saw her.
2
“RED, GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE!” the man yelled. The bear of a man frowned in Gareth’s direction, the closest thing to a smile the man could muster. He was tall, taller even than his men like Gareth, who seemed to have been chosen for this group because they were tall.
Gareth Red placed his weapon on the ground, checking the chamber and then locking the mechanism, then placing the cloth over the rifle’s stock. He pushed himself up with his arms, his biceps and forearms rippling with freshly worked muscle. He jumped straight up, pulling his legs beneath him, and stood.
“Sir,” he said, turning to his boss.
Gareth was chewing gum, and he spat it out toward the tilted blue trashcan that hung on a wooden frame nearby. The wad of gum hit the side of the can and fell to the ground. He adjusted his sunglasses and shrugged, then turned back toward the man who’d called for him.
“Don’t you have a phone, Red?” the man asked.
He shook his head. Technically, yes, he wanted to say. But it was broken.
“Why not?”
“It’s — I’m not really a tech guy,” he lied.
The man stared at him. “Whatever, Red.”
“You’ve been requested in the office,” the man said.
“Me?”
“Did I stutter?”
Gareth found that place inside him he used for times like this, mustering up a bit of sarcasm. The sarcasm helped — not anyone else, really, but it helped him. “Are you prone to stuttering?” Gareth asked. “I mean, I didn’t hear anything, but sometimes the stuttering can be subtle, like a —”
“Dammit, Red, that mouth of yours. I tell you what — if it wasn’t for your shot you’d be out of here. And probably with a few busted lips.”
“A few?” Red asked, about to jump into another joke.
The man just pointed at the office.
Red shrugged again, and started walking — slowly — up the hill.
The training camp they were in was owned by the US government, but it barely qualified in Gareth’s mind as a ‘camp.’ If it wasn’t for the blue trash can, the sole reminder of civilization anywhere in sight save for the main office building, he’d have thought they had built the camp for woodland beasts and birds.
His own campsite, for example, was a terrible excuse for a campsite. If he was on a survival training exercise, he’d have expected to run up against some difficult sleeping arrangements, but this had been billed as a ‘remote training camp,’ built on ‘old state park grounds.’
He wondered what state would have campgrounds that featured tent pads made of briar bushes and rocks, with barely enough clearance to set up a tent.
And the tents…. The tents made him crazy. He’d had better options in his childhood Boy Scout troop. These tents had poles that were duct taped together in places, their ability to bend now permanently reduced. The tent walls themselves were ripping in more than one spot, and if it wasn’t for the rain it would have allowed for a decent draft to work its way through the tent.
But it was raining a lot, almost nonstop. For the five days he’d been here, the rain was the part of the experience that he hated most. After long, grueling days, long nights, and barely enough food to keep a rat alive, he would crash inside the tent — which he was forced to share with a snoring teammate, nonetheless — and only be asleep for seconds before the rain would start.
He was wet now, actually, even though it hadn’t rained in a good half-hour.
He shook his head, trying to force the smile back. Smiling was helpful for some people to actually change the way they felt about a situation. For Gareth, it was simply cathartic. It helped him process, possibly to find the optimism in life. It was habitual now, something he couldn’t control. A habit he’d built long ago, in what felt like a previous life, smiling was a way to have a bit of control in a situation.
When nothing else could be controlled, smiling could. As off-putting as it was to some people, smiling was a way for Gareth to control them. To keep them off-balance, or at least unsure of his next move.
As his father used to say, ‘you can’t argue with a smiling man.’
Untrue, he’d discovered, but it certainly made the argument more fun.
He reached the makeshift ‘office,’ a Tuff-shed that had been haphazardly placed on another ‘campsite’ full of briar and rocks, and entered. He had to duck through the door, and even inside he wasn’t comfortable standing up to his full height.
“You have a lot of taller guys here,” he said. “Seems like you could have bought a taller office.”
The man sitting at the desk swiveled his head around and stood up. “Seems like you could have just been shorter.”
Red wasn’t sure what to say. He stuck his tongue out to the side of his cheek, staring at the guy at the desk.
“You Gleeson?” he asked.
The guy nodded. “Yeah. You Red?”
Gareth nodded.
“Great,” the man said, with about as much enthusiasm as one of the rocks that held the place up. “You’re done here.”
Gareth frowned. “But my shooting has been far better than —”
“I know exactly how your shooting has been,” Gleeson said. “That’s part of the reason you’re done — you don’t really need it. The other part is that I’m not sure you’re enjoying it a whole lot here.”
Gareth raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why would you think that? Is it because you can also hear Godzilla snoring next to me at night? Or is it the rain? It’s the rain, isn’t it? Or I guess it could be the food. You guys have us on some sort of ‘Oregon Trail’ rations. You remember that game? You’re about the right age for it, and —”
Gleeson held up a hand. “Red, I’m in charge of this place, but I’m not your commanding officer. Still, if I may speak freely, you need to learn when to shut the hell up.”
Gareth stood up straighter. “Got it.”
“You’re leaving because you’ve been called back.”
“My unit?”
“No. Something else.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“I wish I could. Orders came in this morning, and I wasn’t allowed to pull the second page.”
Gareth laughed. “Tell me you’re joking. Everybody pulls the second page, man. Who would know? Just give it a quick —”
“I’m not going to read private orders from a colonel.”
“From a — yeah, okay, give them here.”