The Argus Deceit

by Chuck Grossart

  “Did you see the other people in there?”

  “I was kinda busy trying to get my ass out the door, so no.”

  “They were shot. Some of them went down, but others were just standing there. Bleeding. Not reacting.”

  “Welcome to your new world, Brody Quail.”

  My new world. What did she mean by that? “I need some answers, Connie. That is your name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s my name. That much I know. As for the rest, all I can do is tell you what’s happened to me. I don’t have very many answers.”

  “Then we need to find a safe place to talk. You said before the shadow man could only go where things were stable, right?” That memory had returned, too. How he’d seen the thing during his firefight flashback (or whatever the living hell it was), how he’d shot at the silhouette, the bullet disappearing into what seemed to be an empty black chasm in the shape of a man. He’d seen it other times, too, but those memories were out of reach.

  “That’s right. I’ve only seen him where things are put together, away from the boundaries.”

  “Like the one at the end of the alley?”

  They both looked down the alley, Brody remembering the swirling black clouds.

  “Yes, like that,” Connie replied. “But they’re hard to find. Once you’ve been to a place, they’re gone. They’re only where you haven’t been before.”

  “So you’re saying the one at the end of the alley is gone?”

  “It might be, or it might still be there. I don’t know, Brody. It might be different with you. I’m only telling you what I’ve seen.”

  Brody could tell Connie was frustrated and scared. “Okay. We’ll go take a look. If it’s not there, we’ll find another one.”

  “Okay, but we have to hurry.”

  Brody remembered. “Sometimes, you have hours, sometimes, minutes.”

  “Yeah.” She smiled at him. “You’re remembering a lot of it now, aren’t you.”

  “I’m remembering things, but I can’t say a lot, because I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’ll come, believe me.” She took his hand, and they walked to the end of the alley.

  The boundary was gone. Beyond the alley was another street lined by buildings. Just as it should be. “You were right,” Brody said. “It’s back to normal.”

  “Yeah, normal.” Connie moaned a little, and Brody steadied her.

  “It’s happening again, isn’t it.”

  Connie took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Like I said, could be hours, could be minutes. We have to make use of the time we have. We need to find a place you’ve never been before, okay?”

  Brody remembered the shadow man pointing up the street, as if he were urging him to go in that direction. “Before,” Brody began, finding it difficult to find the word to describe time—Today? Yesterday?—“the shadow man was there on the street, pointing past my apartment. It was like he wanted me to go there.”

  “Then we shouldn’t,” Connie replied quickly.

  “Why?”

  “It wants us, Brody. Can’t you feel it?”

  He did, but for some reason he wasn’t as fearful of the shadow man. “I do, but—”

  “Then quick, someplace else.”

  Brody didn’t want to retrace their path, not with the bar patrons (wounded ones, at that) and the three thugs lying in wait. Or maybe they were following him and Connie right now. He looked at the other end of the alley, half expecting to see them there, led by Jimmy himself, shotgun in hand. But no one was there. “Before yesterday, or whenever it was, I’d never been here before. I don’t think I’ve ever been to any place on this street. Would one of the buildings work?”

  “Let’s find out,” Connie said.

  Brody took a step and kicked something. When he looked down, he saw his rifle lying at his feet. “I dropped this,” he said, not bothering to qualify his statement with any frame of reference (yesterday, today) simply because his grasp on time was eroding.

  “Bring it,” Connie said. “It might come in handy.”

  “Ever shot one of these before?” Brody asked.

  Connie shook her head.

  “Too bad. I used to be pretty good with a rifle, when I had both arms.”

  “You seemed to shoot well enough last time.”

  “Well, let’s hope I don’t have to do it again.”

  They quickly walked down the street (the one that wasn’t there previously) and ducked inside another alley. They crouched behind a dumpster.

  “We should be okay here for a while,” Connie said, hugging her knees to her chest, her back against brick.

  Brody leaned his rifle against the wall. “How are you feeling?” he asked. She hadn’t shown any additional signs that her time was running out, no moaning or grimacing from pain as before.

  “I’m fine,” she replied. “You’re looking better than the last time we were in an alley hiding behind a dumpster.”

  Brody remembered his ribs, how badly they’d hurt after the beating he’d taken. Probably broken. But now perfectly fine. “Okay, Connie. Tell me what the heck is going on here.”

  “Do you dream, Brody?”

  That was an odd question, not what he wanted to hear from her. He wanted an explanation. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just answer my question,” Connie said forcefully. “Do you have any dreams?”

  Brody wanted to say yes, but honestly, he couldn’t. He didn’t even remember the last time he’d made it back to his apartment and crawled into his bed. (Had he ever?) “I’m—I’m not sure.”

  “Exactly. I wasn’t sure either.” Connie had said that she knew what was happening to him because she’d gone through it, too. Whatever it was.

  “And you do now? Have dreams?” he asked.

  “Yes. And you will, too.”

  Brody swallowed, hard, at the tone of her voice, feeling trapped in an unavoidable downward spiral. “You’ve got to tell me what’s happening, Connie.”

  “I wish I could. All I know is, I’m here, and then I’m not.”

  “And when you’re not—here, that is—you’re in the . . . whatever the hell that black crap was that used to be where we are right now.” Even as he said it, he had a hard time grasping the meaning of the words that were coming from his mouth.

  “Yeah, I’m in that place.”

  Brody saw her shudder and placed his hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I don’t even know who I am anymore,” she said, on the verge of sobbing, her voice tight. “This place is all wrong. All wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve heard them yourself, Brody. She doesn’t belong here. And they’re right. I don’t belong here. Everything I know—knew—is gone. I’m gone.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I was a worker in an underground facility, fifteen miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. After the war. My job was to keep the purification machinery running.”

  That explains the coveralls, Brody thought. After the war didn’t make any sense, though. There were half a million US troops over there still.

  “I had a family there, people I knew,” she continued. “Then it all changed. I thought I was blacking out at first, but then I started to remember things, just like you are.” She wiped a tear—only one—from her cheek. “Like those three clowns on the street that beat the crap out of you the last time we were here. You’ve seen them before, right? More times than you can remember?”

  Brody nodded, dumbstruck.

  “And I’ll bet you remember them doing things differently, sometimes big things, sometimes not, every time you saw them?”

  Her words ran true. He remembered the same general sequence of events: leaving the bar, knowing he was being followed, then being confronted by three thugs, but each time led to a different outcome. More than he could remember. He nodded again.

  “The same thing started happening to me, Brody. The same t
hing. Then everything began to get shorter. I’d only remember being at my job for a few minutes at a time before I’d black out. And other times, everyone else would just be standing there, still as statues, and then when they started moving again, it was as if nothing had happened. But I knew. And I remembered. God, I thought I was going crazy!”

  Brody was overcome by dread. He remembered the three thugs, still as statues like she said. He was experiencing the same things that Connie had, which meant she was probably right. Everything that was happening to her would happen to him, too. In time.

  His time would get shorter. He would go to the black place.

  Brody glanced at the rifle leaning against the wall. It was real, so the firefight had to have been real, too, right? Impossible; that was a battle he had not been a part of while he was over there. Not to mention he had been wearing someone else’s uniform (J O H N S O N) and had both of his arms.

  “Now it’s all gone,” Connie said. “All I know is this place.” She paused, then added, “And you.”

  “What about your dreams?”

  “Once I started having them, I realized that I’d never dreamt before. Never. Not once. But now, I’m having them all the time. When I’m in the other place.”

  “What do you dream about?”

  She shook her head, as if trying to clear the visions from her mind. “Mostly they’re nightmares. Horrible things. I’m little and . . . it’s weird, and I’m not sure I can explain it,” she said, staring at the wall on the other side of the alley. “I’m me, but it doesn’t seem like me, if that makes any sense.”

  Brody didn’t say anything, wanting her to continue. If this was going to happen to him, too, then he wanted to know what to expect.

  Connie took a deep breath. “They’re visions, mostly, snapshots of me as a little girl, but I’m someplace completely different, aboveground, in a house with people who are acting like my parents, but they’re not my mom and dad.”

  Aboveground. “How long have you lived underground?” Brody asked. “I mean, before all this started happening to you.”

  “My whole life. I was born in Nevada Six.”

  She said it matter-of-factly and stared at him like he should know what she meant. He didn’t. Maybe Nevada Six was some sort of government project that they kept hidden from the public or something. “What’s Nevada Six?” he asked.

  “One of the Arks.” She was searching his face for any sort of recognition, but she couldn’t find any. “There were fifteen Arks built right after the war,” she said. “Most of them in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. We lived in the sixth of the eight Nevada Arks.” She paused, staring at him closely. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Brody shook his head. A week ago (or was it even a week? A day?), he would’ve called her delusional. But she was telling the truth. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in the tone of her voice. “What war, Connie?”

  “The China War.” She raised her arms toward the buildings and said, “None of this should be here, Brody. It was all gone before I was born!”

  Brody felt a dull ache at the back of his head, and he remembered.

  There was a desert. Sand, like ash. A dead sky. He’d walked across that ground, but that hadn’t been him, just like Connie had said about her dreams; it was her, but not her. Maybe he was dreaming now.

  “You’re remembering something, aren’t you,” Connie said.

  “I think so.” Brody rubbed the back of his head as the throbbing subsided. “What year was the China War?”

  “2027,” she answered. “I was born five years after it ended.”

  “Connie, it’s 1968. Right here, right now, it’s 1968.”

  “That can’t be possible,” she said, shaking her head.

  “It’s 1968, and we’re in Garland Trail, Nebraska.”

  “What, so I’m from the future? Is that what you’re saying?” Her voice was cracking. Brody moved closer and put his arm around her shoulders. He could feel

  her body trembling

  Again the ache pounded at the back of his head, this time a little stronger. He winced but managed to hide the pain from Connie. He’d experienced a quick flash (him, but not him) of hiding in a dark place, with a girl in his arms. Small. Trembling. Connie?

  “I don’t think either of us knows exactly what’s going on,” Brody said. “But right now, we have this.” He pulled his arm back and grabbed her hand, squeezing it tightly.

  A tiny smile crossed her lips as she looked up at him.

  “We’ll stick together,” he said, “and figure this out, okay?”

  She nodded with little conviction. “Until I disappear again.”

  “When I saw you last—one of the other times before this—you said I was the only one who remembered your name,” Brody said.

  She smiled. “Yeah, Brody Quail. You’re the only other person I’ve run into here that’s remembered me. The rest of them yell at me to leave, say that I don’t belong there. God, if I knew how to get back home, I would.”

  “And the shadow man?” Brody asked.

  “And the shadow man,” Connie said with a sigh. “I used to see him, too. Before I started coming here.”

  “In that underground place? Nevada Six?”

  She nodded. “At first, I couldn’t see him, but I knew someone was there, watching me. Know what I mean? Then I started to actually see him. An empty hole shaped like a person.”

  “And it’s the same perso—thing that’s chasing us here?”

  “It’s the same. It’s evil, Brody. It wants us both.”

  Brody remembered how the shadow man had pointed down the street, trying to get him to go in a particular direction. In that instance, he hadn’t felt any danger but instead thought it was trying to help. “Why does it want us?” he asked.

  “It wants to kill us, Brody. Just like it killed my family.”

  Connie suddenly threw her head back, hitting the brick wall, and she let out a tiny scream of pain. She squeezed his hand so tightly it hurt.

  She was going to disappear. “No no no, not yet!” Brody said.

  “Oh God, Brody!”

  “Hold on, Connie! Hold on!” He pulled her closer, wishing he could wrap another arm around her to hold her tight.

  The effort would be futile.

  The other girl, in the dark place, had vanished right from his (but not his) arms.

  Her breaths were coming quick and furious. “Come back here! We’ll find each other here!” She screamed—and then wasn’t there, her voice echoing through the alley and into the night.

  Brody scrambled to his feet. He ran from the alley and turned left, his boots thudding against the asphalt as he ran to a place he’d never been before. The buildings flashed by in the corner of his eye, one after the other, until the street ended in a swirling black cloud.

  A boundary.

  Connie was in there somewhere. In the blackness.

  Brody held his breath, closed his eyes, and ran into the shadows.

  Chapter 25

  BRODY16

  West Glenn, Colorado

  Monday, March 30, 1981

  “It doesn’t work from the outside,” Brody yelled, leaning over and popping the door lever.

  “Thanks,” Joan said, placing her books between them on the bench seat and slamming her door shut. “Ouch! What the heck?” She sat up a little and reached under her leg, pulling out whatever she’d sat on. She held it up for Brody to see. “Brody Quail, are you still playing with little-kid toys?”

  Where in the heck did that come from? “That’s not mine,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. He took the toy from Joan’s hand and tossed it in the backseat. He really had no idea how it had gotten in his car; no one else had ridden with him for . . . well, he wasn’t sure, but he was certain no one had sat in the passenger seat for a long time, maybe even since his dad taught him how to drive. Brody wondered why his memory was so fuzzy all of a sudden. Remembering when someone was in your car should be ea
sy, right?

  “Little brother, maybe?” Joan asked. From the twinkle in her eyes, she was obviously enjoying this.

  Brody smiled but only to hide the onset of confusion he was feeling. “Nah, I don’t have a little—”

  Brother.

  He saw a face in his mind, a small boy’s. A face he felt he knew.

  And then a sledgehammer hit him. He grabbed the back of his head as a fiery pain rocketed down his neck and through his spine. His vision swirled, tiny points of light shooting across his closed eyelids. He could hear himself screaming, but even that faded away as blackness overtook him.

  He felt himself tumbling, head over heels, as if he’d been pulled from the car and tossed into the air by a giant unseen hand.

  And then it stopped.

  There was no impact, no thud against the ground as he came to rest, as he half expected.

  It just stopped.

  The pain was gone, and the horrible vertigo had ceased along with it. He wasn’t hurt, as far as he could tell, but was afraid to open his eyes.

  But, no, that wasn’t right.

  His eyes weren’t closed. He was blinking. His eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. My God, I’m blind, he thought, his heart thudding away. He tried to bring his hand to his face, but he couldn’t. He tried to move his legs. Why aren’t they moving?

  He was fixed in place. Brody was confused, shocked. He could feel the panic building in his body. He wanted to scream but couldn’t produce a sound.

  The space was silent and cold, wherever he was. Brody was alone in the darkness, unable to move, speak, or see. There was no sound, no scent, and no way to judge the passage of time.

  Had he been here for minutes? Hours? How did he get here? He tried to move again but couldn’t shift any of his extremities. A terrible, frustrating feeling, made worse by the burning in his gut. He ached from hunger.

  But that meant he wasn’t dead, right? If this was death, and he was trapped in some dark place (as opposed to going where angels sing and everyone you’ve ever known is there waiting), then he wouldn’t feel anything, right? No, he wasn’t dead. He could sense the rise and fall of his chest, feel himself blinking, moving his eyes. If he were really dead, none of that should be possible.