Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part I Code Name: Supernova
Part II Code Name: Revenant
Part III Code Name: Sone
Part IV Code Name: Zenith
Part V Code Names: Succubus & Echo
Part VI Code Name: Phobos
Part VII Code Name: Bhoot
Part VIII Code Name: Gorgon
Part IX Code Names: Penumbra & Singularity
Connect With the Author
Operation Blackout
Copyright © 2016 by JL Middleton. All rights reserved.
First Edition: January 2018
Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgements
There are many people to whom I owe my appreciation for helping make this happen. To my darling husband, Jared, you have given me much-needed support and advice, but more importantly, you have given me encouragement. Without your assistance, I would never have made it this far.
To my dear friend Krista De Los Santos, you are the reason I even embarked on this journey. You inspired me to take up writing again, and your criticisms improved the foundation on which I built this story.
To Bradley McLeod and Adam Schreiber, thank you for all the conversations and laughter we’ve shared over the years. Finally, to Annie Parlock, you taught me the value of good feedback, and without your input, I wouldn’t have enjoyed writing nearly as much.
Prologue
Due to the enigmatic and often esoteric nature of Others, it is difficult to pinpoint when they began to appear in history. There has been speculation that they are the “gods” of old, but it is possible that they appeared more recently. The first recorded instance of an Other on American soil was during the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony in 1590. The writings of John White, one of the unfortunate colonists, survive as the only narrative of the colony’s ultimate fate. White wrote that in the winter of 1588, one of the settlement’s infants—of which there were three, including the infamous Virginia Dare—was emitting a terrible fume that rotted organic matter that was placed too close to it. A great divide occurred within the community between those who wished to banish this child, whom they assumed was demonically possessed, and those who wished to try to exorcise the demon. Despite flared tempers, the debate remained relatively free from violence, and most of the colony chose to pack up and move, its residents refusing to kill an innocent infant but unwilling to be near its poisonous influence. White asserted that moving the child to the wilds would certainly kill it, so he stayed with the child in the abandoned colony until the end. He could not complete his narrative, as he disappeared long before a different John White, Virginia Dare’s grandfather, came with relief supplies from England. But it was implied that the child’s sphere of influence expanded to encompass the entire town and that the child would soon starve since no food could survive the fumes. His writings were found by White’s namesake, who immediately locked them away, and they were not discovered again for another three centuries. It is assumed that this secondary White’s actions occurred because the infant was, in reality, Virginia Dare, and he did not want his family’s name or memory sullied. Despite the fact that the Roanoke Incident did not contribute directly to the colonists’ deaths or disappearance, it is foundational to the government’s fear of Others.
Further recorded incidents were isolated and few over the years, but each struck a chord with the world governments, and it became evident that the number of instances was accelerating. Notable among these were the Tunguska Event (1908), the Anjikuni Mystery (1930), the Ourang Medan (1948), and the Dyatlov Pass Incident (1959), and while speculations about these events have made their rounds in paranormal circles for years, only Others really know what occurred.
Unfortunately, these incidents also demonstrated to the government that Others were dangerous and had to be destroyed for the good of the people and especially for world governments. A single person with such power, even if it could be used only once, as demonstrated during the above events, posed a significant threat. The most influential governments—the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Germany, and even the USSR and China—agreed to destroy Others where they found them and to erase any evidence of their existence. This campaign would become known as Operation Blackout, and it was more than a new tool for the Cold War. Since Others could not be controlled, they were considered a time bomb more potent than nuclear weapons. Fear laid the groundwork for cooperation on a global scale, even surpassing the artificial boundaries of the Cold War.
For many years, the understood threat of Others was the widely held belief—until the Cokeville Miracle in 1986. A young couple took the occupants of Cokeville Elementary hostage and threatened to detonate a homemade gasoline bomb. Though the bomb was detonated accidentally, few victims were actually injured, and while the media focused on the mysterious “angels” who shielded the children from the blast, the US government discovered something different: a child who had used his power instinctively to defend himself but, most importantly, had not killed any bystanders in the process. The boy, Eric Dane, was removed from his parents’ custody and placed in government care. He and his abilities were tirelessly researched over the years, and Dane proved to be an Other of enormous talent. But, more critically, he served as an ambassador for Others by demonstrating that they could be trained and controlled and did not need to be feared.
This led to the birth of the Bureau of Special Interests (BSI), and Dane was forever sealed within its walls. Over the years, the BSI developed its purpose, aims, and methods and created special divisions. But it is the Exceptional Division that we must fear. It is these people who sniff out Others. Their special agents come with sweet words and promises to instruct Others to use their abilities, but these are lies. It is the job of the Exceptional Division to cull the “useful” from the “dangerous.” If an Other cannot be useful to the government, he will be put to death so that he cannot be a danger to the public. Many have been lured inside the walls of the BSI never to depart, and the only crime of these men and women was to be born with a power that we don’t understand. They are executed without a trial, but a small percentage of traitors help to spare their lives. Be forewarned: Never take pity on an agent of the BSI. They believe that any Other, regardless of their age, is a monster or a tool and that anyone who helps them to escape is a traitor. These men destroy what they don’t understand and make enemies whom they don’t yet know.
— Charles Moreau
Excerpt from VSION Manifesto
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It is the opinion of this body that the training program must be rethought and completely overhauled. While the post-1986 operation has made amazing leaps in regard to the assessment and tracking of Others, it is still failing in its primary mission: to protect the public and prevent exposure to the existence of Others. Instead of exterminating Others, BSI agents must apprehend them in a manner that makes them amiable to joining our ranks. It could be argued that this has provided propaganda fodder for the Special Interest of Ot
hers Network (SION) and opportunities for it to engage our agents and further risk exposing Blackout. The Vanguard (VSION) has become bolder and attempts to evade BSI agents by engaging them in public, where the primary directive is to preserve Blackout. Even when eliminating the terrorist element of VSION as a factor, incidents that lead to the apprehension of newly discovered Others have dangerously skirted widespread public exposure.
Regardless of the circumstances, the conversion rate of Others into useful assets is low. During our best year, in which we managed to recruit fifteen individuals into our training program, only one proved to have practical application, and the rest were released back into the civilian population to be monitored. This is a tremendous drain on our budget, and we will not always have the level of funding we currently have. Our funding was first cut following the shuffling of the bureau beneath the Department of Homeland Security’s umbrella, and we have experienced slashes to our budget every year that the war in Iraq continues. We must get ahead of the curve and trim our budget before the government does it for us.
If we refocus our goals purely toward the elimination of Others, we can transfer funding from the training and monitoring programs to tracking and research. The Others in the civilian population do nothing but drain our funds. They have not encouraged undiscovered Others to seek us out or join our ranks, so they do nothing for recruitment, and SION continues to use them for its own propaganda. Therefore, I suggest we cut our losses in that department and scrap the program. Unfortunately, this means the euthanasia of the remaining subjects, but we would be better able to focus on converting Others into assets…
… Our three current assets would likely have unfavorable reactions to this shift in policy, so I suggest we do not allow them to find out. We have already placed a blind on Bloodhound, so double-blinding him would likely create no issues. He already sees Others as a danger to society and has proven himself capable of euthanizing them without prejudice. This is likely due to his ignorance of his true nature, and I strongly recommend against placing him in the training program, as any improvement in detection would likely be outweighed by a subsequent decline in performance.
Since Angel is perceptive and has been with us the longest, he is most likely to notice the policy shift first. Fortunately, he is the primary example of how we need to recruit Others at younger ages than our other two subjects, as indoctrination is more effective on preadolescent subjects. If we keep this new shift of focus from him for several months to a year, when it would become routine, I believe he would accept the change with minimal protests and even begin to advocate it if it is framed properly when presented to him.
Antithesis is likely to be the most receptive to the change because she readily embraced Operation Blackout’s doctrine and incorporated it into her personal belief system. However, I still recommend withholding the change from her until the time is right and planning the revelation carefully to minimize any adverse reaction to the news. She is our greatest asset, so we must take special care of her psychological state. I also highly advise that she be separated from Agent Lawrence Johnson, as will be detailed later in this report.
—Excerpts from the Annual Performance Review, 2015
Bureau of Special Interests Archive
Part I
Code Name: Supernova
Cassie waited impatiently for the train to arrive. She knew that if she took out her smartphone and started playing a game, the train would arrive immediately, but if she stared at the dark tunnel instead, she would wait forever. The dilemma was partially already resolved: Her phone was buried deep in her gym bag beneath her cheerleading uniform and the kitschy shirt and apron she had to wear for work. The phone may also have migrated deeper into her gym bag to rest beneath the two schoolbooks for the homework that she didn’t intend to do. She had a busy schedule, and a formal education was low on her list of priorities. She needed to remember not to bring the heavy books home next time so she could give her shoulder a break, but the looks of disappointment that she received from her older brother, Orion, always shamed her into packing the books anyway, despite having no intention of doing the homework.
They were not from a normal family: The Starrs were rich due to the unexpected success of Cassie’s parents’ book Life of the Universe, which consistently sold millions of copies each year despite having been published over ten years ago. The New York Times called it “the most accessible book on cosmology since A Brief History of Time” when assessing why it was still on the Best Seller List. Her parents were also tenured professors at Berkeley, though they had recently taken a sabbatical to accept jobs at a small observatory three hours away in northern New York. Cassie didn’t understand her parents’ obsession with astronomy, but she appreciated their money.
She rarely saw her parents, who had begun to take extended trips when she’d turned four, and she had no relationship with her surviving grandparents. Her parents now spent the week in Mason and commuted home on weekends if they felt so inclined, which they often didn’t. She didn’t understand why her parents had bothered to have children when they clearly hadn’t wanted them. So, as far as family was concerned, all that was really left was her morose and serious older brother, Orion, who was attending college in Manhattan. They received a weekly allowance from their parents, which included money for groceries and utilities, but Orion had insisted that Cassie get a job if she wanted extra cash to spend. This was why she worked at Hallowed Grounds, a tacky coffeehouse that had opened during the initial zombie craze of the early 2000s. In addition to the corny name, the café was decorated in a postapocalyptic style as if the fabled Y2K had set off the zombie apocalypse. It included such fare as the “Bitten Survivor,” which was a decaffeinated cappuccino, and the “Night of the Living Dead,” which was three shots of espresso, strawberry flavoring, and a cheap zombie head decoration. Her bosses were a couple in their late thirties who seemed perpetually stuck in their teenage pop culture years, but they were alright, and they tried to work around her otherwise busy schedule. Immediately after school, she had cheerleading practice followed by swim team practice, and the combination sometimes kept her out until eight. She’d have to grab dinner at Hallowed Grounds to supplement the meal that Orion always packed for her, and then she would close the shop at around ten or eleven—sometimes even later, as Hallowed Grounds had no set closing hours. She would nap on the subway, thankfully never missing her stop, and then go to bed as soon as she got home.
No matter how late she was out, she could count on Orion to be waiting in the kitchen to greet her. Most days, she was met with a silent, disapproving gaze or a lecture about her doing too much, but he always made sure she was home. Likewise, he had breakfast waiting for her when she awoke, even though she seldom had time to eat it.
Orion was twenty-two and rail thin, but he appeared to be more immature due to his shy nature and tendency to slouch. He had short, curly hair, which was dirty blond like their mother’s, and bags under his hazel eyes, which reflected a perpetual thousand-yard stare whenever he was not actively engaged. He preferred baggy clothes, especially his black hoodie, and because he rarely ventured from the apartment, she didn’t think he had any friends. This was such a sharp contrast to Cassie that she sometimes wondered if they were actually related.
Cassie was an active sixteen-year-old with a sharp sense of style. She spent her allowance and extra earnings on the latest outfits and makeup. Her eye shadow technique was so good that nobody noticed that her eyes were a pedestrian brown, and even if they did, they didn’t dare mention it to her in case they faced the wrath of her clique. Her red hair was full and wavy, not curly and challenging like her brother’s, but she did share his slender build. However, she had enough friends that she didn’t have to be home on any weekend that her parents chose to visit—not even for a moment—and this arrangement seemed to suit all parties, as her parents never complained. In fact, only her brother obj
ected, and she suspected it was because he didn’t want to deal with them alone.
Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen or heard from her parents since school had begun several months ago, but she knew that they were still alive; otherwise, her allowance would have stopped by now. Since she saw them so rarely, she had only a faint impression of them when she pictured their faces: an attractive, smiling couple in their late thirties, despite the two of them being much older now. Both were tall and blond, though her mother’s hair was curly and ashy compared to her father’s. They seemed more like models in a department store catalogue than real people, and for much of her childhood, she’d assumed that the pictures of them adorning the walls of the apartment had been the ones that had come with the frames. The only indication of time passing was her mother’s fading beauty juxtaposed with her father’s baby face. After a few years, the family stopped bothering to update the photographs.
It may have been the late hour, or she may have become lost in her thoughts about school, but she didn’t notice the dark man slink up behind her as she exited the subway station. She felt the knife in her back and heard a greasy voice in her ear: “Give me the money.” Her heartbeat exploded as the knife tip pierced her shirt, and blood drops formed on her back. She froze, which didn’t help the situation, as she held steadfastly to the gym bag that was slung over her shoulder. She didn’t know why she didn’t cooperate; the bag had nothing valuable in it, save for her phone and a few dollars, and she had been instructed countless times to surrender her belongings and report the theft to the police afterward.
Operation Blackout Page 1