by JJ Jones
Aubrey was thrown off by the question. It was probably arrogant of her, but she had somehow expected that he would already know who she was and at least a little bit about her. But the Commander didn’t have the patience for her to get thrown off and his nostrils flared impatiently, causing Conrad to have to step in and cover for her yet again. Damn. She could feel her whole face on fire and knew that it must show on her pale Irish skin. This was not at all the start she had been hoping to get off to.
“This is Aubrey Conner. Very dedicated, very tenacious. I think you’ll find that you’re very satisfied with our choice.”
“Yes? Well, she looks the part, which is the most important thing in this case. All right, she’ll do. And tell me, Ms. Conner, have you been debriefed on what you are to address me by?”
“Yes, sir. I was told to call you Commander. Is that correct?”
“It is. Good, now that we’re done with the pleasantries, let’s get started.”
The Commander sat down, the expression on his face making it clear that he expected the others to do the same. Pleasantries? Geez, this guy was a trip, she thought. He hadn’t even bothered to introduce the poor scientist. It appeared that he didn’t rate high enough for that. Even so, the Commander was now looking at the man with impatient expectation, like he had somehow missed a cue he hadn’t, until that very moment, known he had.
“Right! Right, well then. Hello, Mr. Conrad, Ms. Conner. Is it Mrs. or Ms., by the way?”
“It’s Ms.,” Aubrey said with as warm a voice as she could manage, given the uncomfortable tension in the room. She saw the little man open his mouth to speak, saw that he looked ever so slightly encouraged by the interaction, but then promptly shut it again when the Commander spoke.
“Good god, man, we aren’t at a tea party, are we? Are we? Did someone schedule a tea party and just forget to tell me about it?”
“No, sir.”
“Well then, get on with it. Fuck the civility. Let’s get this over with.”
“Oh-OK, yes. So. We’re here today to discuss the next biggest threat this country must face. Is it terrorism? No, not in the sense we’re used to thinking of it. This is something far more troublesome and far more difficult to believe. This delves into things we never imagined to be possible, things that until recently we only believed to exist in children’s stories and gothic horror novels. Indeed, that is most certainly what the majority of the population still believes and it is how it must stay.”
“I’m sorry,” Aubrey interjected uncertainty, eliciting a response from the Commander that made it clear that such interruptions were strongly frowned upon, “but I don’t think I understand.”
“I’m not surprised. Now, please be warned, this can come as quite a shock, but you must be strong. What I’m talking about is straight out of the paranormal. Specifically, I’m talking about shifters.”
Shifters. What he was talking about was shifters. Like, werewolves? Like that kind of shifter? Surely not. There was no way she was in the middle of a top secret, classified military meeting about werewolves. It just wasn’t possible. But even as she began to smile, she saw the scientist glance nervously from one man in the room to the other, saving her for last of all.
She followed his example and noted with growing discomfort that she was the only one in the room smiling. If this was all some kind of big joke, they were playing it off perfectly. Honestly, a little bit too perfectly. Because they weren’t joking, were they? They were completely, deadly serious and all three men expected her to be the same.
Well, if that was the case, she was going to need to see some proof. This was one of those instances when she wasn’t going to be able to go on faith alone. Seeing was believing, after all. At least for her it was. Then, just as if he could read her mind, the commander spoke and this time it was like he was speaking directly to her.
“I realize that this may not be an easy thing to accept. I hope it isn’t, in fact. I respect a woman with a skeptical eye, a good barometer for bullshit, so to speak. But I assure you, that is not what this is. And as such, I am prepared to offer you proof. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Proof?”
Aubrey nodded, unsure of her voice. Proof was what she wanted. It was. So then why did she feel so sick to her stomach all of a sudden? She had to shake this off, needed to get her shit together. This was not the time to become squeamish. Men like this one could sense weakness, especially in a woman. Aubrey had learned that through years of putting herself in male dominated scenarios and she was positive that it had never been truer than it was now.
“Good. Good, then proof is exactly what you’ll get. Just don’t forget, Ms. Conner, that you are the one who asked to see it. To see all of our dirty secrets.”
She had made it through the Commander’s entire tour and even through the meeting afterwards without getting sick. She had made it out to her car, in fact, before doubling over and throwing up the pitiful breakfast that had passed as her day’s nourishment up to that point. Damnit, she hated throwing up, especially like this. It was bad enough if it was because she was actually sick, but it was way, way worse if it was a reaction to something upsetting.
And there was no mistake about it, what she had just been made to see was upsetting. She wiped her mouth quickly with the back of her hand and got into her car quickly, determined not to be sick again. Once safely inside her little jeep she just sat there. She couldn’t drive, not yet. Not until she could put the terrors she had seen to the back of her mind. If she tried to drive like this she would crash and she knew it.
It wasn’t the fact that she now knew without a shadow of a doubt that shifters were a real thing that had Aubrey so rattled. She was a rational, reasonable girl but she had also had quite the imagination when she was a little girl and she thought that might make it easier for her than it would be for most to accept the strange or unexplainable.
So no, it wasn’t that shifters existed that had made her sick, it was the way she had seen them being treated. Aubrey had always believed in the necessity of authority and placed a rather large amount of faith in that authority’s ability to make the hard decisions and to make them well. She believed it was what made their country great and set them apart from other places. But she also believed in a certain level of humanity and common human decency and that was what had been completely absent in the facility she had just toured.
All of those shifters, men, women and children, they had all been American citizens, born and bred. But apparently being proven to be a shifter meant that whatever rights that would have normally afforded them were null and void. Apparently, it meant prison. They were putting these people in what amounted to prison camps made underground and especially for them and it was simply because they were what they were born as.
And then there were the military personnel. That had been the hardest of all. Partially because those men and women truly were being held in a prison. This Commander, whoever the fuck he was, had commissioned the building of a military prison underground.
It looked like a standard prison, aside from the lights that shone twenty-four hours a day and the strange bindings that looked more like glow sticks than handcuffs. When she asked about these two things the Commander laughed and clapped the scientist on the back. He looked completely thrilled, like he had been hoping all along that she would ask that very question.
“Those are the workings of this evil genius here. We needed something and he made it a reality. Exactly what you would hope for from a man of science, is it not? Not one of those men who are all talk, all theory and no action.”
“Yes, that’s nice, I’m sure, but what do they do?”
“They keep them contained. See, we haven’t just been containing these shifters to keep them out of the unsuspecting general population. That is a concern, of course, but this operation is by no means as simple as that.”
“Why then? What’s the reason behind it?”
“To learn,” the scientist replied eagerly, so energ
ized now that he didn’t even notice the annoyed look on the Commander’s face at being interrupted, “to learn what makes them different and special. The reason behind that is two-fold. First, it helps us know how to stop them. As with any threat, it is imperative that we are able to neutralize these things. The more we understand about how they operate the more effectively we’re able to do that. The second is the potential to harness.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“It’s quite simple,” the scientist said with a smile she thought he probably considered to be charming but which she actually found creepy. “These creatures have powers that, until fairly recently, we had no idea actually existed in the real world. Currently, those powers make them more, well, more powerful than us.
“But wouldn’t it be amazing if we were able to extract what lies at the root of those abilities? To synthesize it and manufacture it so that your average Joe walking down the street could be every bit as extraordinary as these beings? That’s what I mean by harness. Does it make sense?”
“Yes, perfect sense,” she responded vaguely, feeling ever so slightly faint.
So the lights, the strange material, they were results of research about shifters. For whatever reason, they subdued them, like Superman and kryptonite. Aubrey could feel her head threatening to spin her so far outside of the world that she was comfortable living in, that she would never be able to find her way back again. But even in that state, she knew that it was very, very important for her to maintain a certain facade of normalcy. She had asked to be brought into this world, walked in and demanded it actually, and now she was in it.
She was all the way in it and there was no way to go back. Unless she wanted to be locked up right along with these poor bastards, she needed to keep her composure. She had a pretty good idea of what the people running this show would think of any person who showed the slightest bit of hesitancy over what they were doing. It would be a gut reaction, a delivery of swift retribution in order to protect themselves.
These were the sort of men who believed that what they were doing was for the greater good, that those who criticised their efforts simply did not understand. Because it was for the greater good, the Commander and his merry band of men would feel that they had license to do whatever was required of them to keep their project safe. It was Machiavellian; the ends would justify the means, even if those means involved total atrocities.
“Would you like to see?”
“See what?”
All three men, the scientist, the Commander, and Conrad, were all looking at her with varying degrees of concern and she was all too aware that only Conrad was concerned about her well-being. The other two men were almost definitely concerned that she wasn’t going to be able to handle what they had shown her or what they were about to show her. She had to get a grip. She had to ignore that buzzing in her head that told her to get the fuck out of here and pay attention. This had to be the last question they asked that she missed.
“The area where we keep the shifters we’re experimenting on. We’ve got all different kinds of experiments going on at the moment. We’re conducting experiments on altruism. Those are designed to see if shifters feel the same kind of loyalty as standard humans, to see if they engage in pack mentality. We are still very deeply involved in our study of what is able to weaken the shifters.
“Currently we’ve found that a very specific mixture of sedatives combined with highly charged, crystallized fluorescent lights keeps them so disoriented that you could slit their throats and they would have no idea they were in danger. Then we have the mating studies. Those are designed for us to see in what ways the shifters’ powers change their copulation patterns. It’s all very exciting, the most exciting thing that we’ve had the opportunity to study in our lifetime.”
“And what do you do about their families?”
“Their families?”
“Well sure,” Aubrey explained, surprised that they didn’t just immediately know what she was talking about, “some of these guys have to have wives, husbands, children. Didn’t they notice if their loved ones just up and vanished one day?”
“That isn’t really our concern.”
The Commander’s response was harsh and stark and the sound of it reverberated off of the walls of the otherwise too silent room. So that was it, really, wasn’t it? That was this project in a nutshell. Anything humane, anything involving kindness or respect, that wasn’t really their concern. It was good to know. It might have even been the most important thing for her to know, aside from the answer to one other question she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.
“So where do I fall in all of this? It looks like you have everything running like a well-oiled machine. I guess I don’t see why you would need me. I’m not sure what I have to offer in this whole thing.”
“That’s really quite simple. You’ve got exactly the kind of fresh face we need attached to an operation like this one, one that could be perceived as delicate.”
“Why do you need a face attached to it at all?”
“For the trials. Some of our more dangerous shifters, these would be the military shifters I’m talking about now, they’re just too dangerous to let out again. But these men and women, their military comrades will notice that they’ve gone missing. There are already rumors making their way through bases about the existence of shifters and we fear that once people start going missing, people will begin to put two and two together.
“We need real reasons to keep them locked up, reasons that these shifters’ peers won’t question. Those reasons will come in the form of trials in which each and every one of these individuals will be charged with crimes against their country. Once we’re done with them, nobody will want these people walking free again.
“You’re role is to stand by them during said trials. You provide us with a certain amount of sympathy we wouldn’t otherwise have.”
“Why is that?”
She knew the answer; everyone in the conversation knew the answer. Still, she needed to hear him say it. She needed to hear it coming out of his mouth, why she was so “special” as to have been thought of for a mission like this one.
“Pretty, young, fresh faced. Woman, that’s a big part of it. You get us the sympathy of people who might otherwise prove skeptical. If anything about these trials comes out, it shouldn’t but if it does, it will be difficult to look at a girl like you and see anything ill intentioned.”
So she was the face of the brand. As it turned out, she hadn’t been chosen for her abilities at all. She had been chosen because she was naive and because she looked girly enough for people to sympathize with. This “promotion” was nothing to be proud of, and now she was stuck smack dab in the middle of it. What in the hell was she going to do?
CHAPTER SEVEN
It felt like he was walking through the set of a movie, some big time production with props so good it was impossible to remember it wasn’t real life. You could have taken any action film, any war movie, and that was where he was. As crazy as that would have been, it would have made more sense than the real life he currently found himself living.
Real life. Life. That was laughable. Anyone who called what he and all of the other chumps locked up with him were leading, life was just being cruel. This was no kind of life, it hadn’t been since he was snatched up out of his bed and hauled off to this terrible facility. And now, here he was, walking the impossibly long hallway that would lead him towards his final fate, wearing the cheap suit given to him by the hand of his enemy.
All in all, it was turning out to be a pretty fucked up couple of weeks, if that was how long he had been here. It was kind of hard to tell with all of the drugs they had been pumping into his system and the crazy lights they kept buzzing over his head day and night. They had done their research, whoever the hell “they” were (and it was looking more and more likely all of the time that he really was dealing with the military; the people he had dedicated his entire damn life
to), and they had figured out some interesting ways to keep their targets down.
They had only one flaw that he could determine at this point, but it was a potentially fatal one. Hubris. Just as with all of the poor bastards who wound up utterly destroyed in the Greek tragedies, it was hubris that was going to bring his captors down.
His captors, who thought they were so clever that they had never entertained the idea that one of their prisoners might figure out what they were doing, might even be able to fight back. They had overestimated themselves and underestimated him, and Chase was going to do everything to exploit that fact. He wasn’t going to feel bad about it, either.
Whatever loyalty he had, it had been well proven that it wasn’t appreciated or returned. If nobody else was going to look out for him, then by god he was going to have to start looking out for himself.
“Good luck to you son, wherever they’re sending you. Mercy, mercy, and all of that crap.”
“How come that one’s awake?”