Patient: Crew (The Crew Book 1)

by Hannah Kaplan

  “No I’m not,” I said and opened my door, “and if you won’t drive me I’ll walk, but I’m staying in a hotel near the airport tonight, and I’m getting on a plane with Tim tomorrow.” I started to move from my seat, and Kevin grabbed my arm.

  “You’re an obstinate little shit. Shut the damn door I’ll take you.”

  “There’s a Marriott off the highway about a mile north of the airport,” I said.

  “This is not a wise decision. As a matter of fact it’s a down right stupid ass uninformed decision,” he said, and turned on the radio.

  “I think any decision that doesn’t include my staying with you would be considered bad in your opinion.”

  “What? You have got to be kidding me. Bitch if you think I’m like them government fools back there you’re full of shit. If you think I’m trying to get you to stay with me so that I can drain you and the crew of all future information then you’re not as smart as I thought you were.” He turned the radio to an AM station and found the news. He looked disgusted with me, not hurt, just disgusted. I didn’t care.

  “Then why don’t you want me to go with Tim? Why are you so hell bent on me staying with you?”

  “I’m not hell bent on you staying with me. I want you to stay alive. It’s my duty.”

  “Fuck your duty. I imagine you could interpret the crew’s words to say what you want them to say as long as it tells you what you want to hear.”

  Kevin turned up the radio volume. “August the first, two thousand and twelve is not a day we will soon forget expressly if you’re a resident of Foreman Oklahoma,” the reporter said. “Two hundred and seventy-six children, ages ranging from twelve to the youngest victim, a seven-week old baby, have been murdered. Also among the dead are one hundred and eighteen parents and school faculty.”

  “You wrote about this,” Kevin said. “It’s been the lead topic in the sessions for the last week.”

  “Last night I heard The Preacher talking about Tim and Marla and some person named Albert.”

  “Finneaus Albert, he’s the bomber. He’s not going to stop until there’s a thousand deaths.”

  “The Singer’s song last night was, death begins and will not end until a thousand souls are released,” I said.

  “I need to go through those pages. The death count is at three hundred and ninety four, not even halfway to a thousand. He’ll strike again and soon. The crew will tell us where to find him. I’ll make a deal with you, we’ll check into a hotel, sit down together and see what the crew has said in the last few sessions. How’s that sound?”

  I was thinking about his deal when I heard a siren and looked behind us. There was a police cruiser tailing us. Kevin put on the blinker and started to pull over. “Go,” I said. “Outrun him.”

  “We’re not going to outrun him,” he chuckled. “Stay here and I’ll take care of it.” Kevin got out of the car and walked to the cruiser behind us. I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see them. Kevin put his arm around the cop, which I thought was strange, and the cop patted him on the back. Their bodies were turned to the cruiser so I couldn’t see them. After a few minutes, Kevin was back in the car, and laughing. “I went to school with that kid, good times,” he laughed. “Let’s get you checked into a hotel.”

  “Why’d he stop us?”

  “We left the flashers on,” he said and pushed the button to turn them off. “We must’ve forgotten when we got back on the highway. I told him that me and my lady were having a little tiff and things are chilled now.”

  When we’d arrived at the Marriot Kevin checked us in, and made sure I was safe inside the room. He went back to the car for the notebooks and to call home. I got some clothes out of the bag Jim had packed for me and headed to the shower. The water was cool and clean. I let it pour over me before I began to clean the soot off my skin and hair. I was devastated to the point of numbness. I held tightly to the sound of Jim’s voice in my ear telling me to stay tough. I washed my hands and looked at the ring Jima had put on my finger. She didn’t think I knew it was her mother’s ring, but I knew. I’d given it to her on her sixteenth birthday. It was silver with little interlocking hearts that covered the front. It was a simple little ring. I affirmed my promise to Jima out loud. “I’ll never take it off, not until I give it back to you.”

  I stretched out on the bed and turned on the TV to a local news station. They showed the grieving people in Forman, Oklahoma. Somebody’s child, mother, sister, brother or father. It was more than I could endure. I flipped the channels, but it was the same on every network. The screen would light up with the depressed relatives and friends holding pictures of their loved ones who had been murdered. The bomb expert explained how the building had imploded. There was no way out for any of them. The local fire department was still searching non-stop for survivors. There was little to no hope of there being any. The bombs were filled with gasoline and other heat explosives. When the building fell it was like being trapped in a brick oven. Whoever might have escaped being crushed was cooked within minutes.

  I turned the TV off and looked out the window. Kevin was sitting in the front seat of the car. He was using a laptop while talking on his cell. He seemed to be deep into the conversation and pounding on the keyboard at the same time. He picked up something from the passenger seat and looked down at it and then went back to pounding on the keyboard.

  I went back to bed, closed my eyes and thought about Jim. “He loves you,” that’s what Fat Boy had said. “He loves you.” He loves the thought of me; I told myself. He can’t love the reality of me. I heard the electronic key in the door followed by a quiet beep, and then Kevin walked in carrying a small box.

  “You need to rest,” he said, flipped off the room light and pulled the bathroom door shut leaving a small sliver of light. “It’s been a long ass day.”

  “You can say that again, but please don’t.”

  “Go to sleep,” he insisted. “I’ll get you up early.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “You could use a little sleep yourself.”

  “Eh, I’m used to it. I don’t require much shuteye.” He set the box on the bed and took out my notebooks. “I swear girl you about wrote a novel in the last few days. Are they always so prolific?”

  “My all time record for one session is twelve journals with each hand, twenty-four total over a thirty-one hour session,” I said.

  “Damn,” Kevin said. “Your hands must have been about ready to fall off.”

  “I don’t remember if my hands were hurting, but I do remember having to pee and being thirsty at the same time,” I said. We both laughed for a second and that was the first time I had felt good, however brief, for many hours.

  “Where do you go to?” he asked. “I mean when they’re taking over.”

  “They take over?” I asked myself more than him. “I guess they do take over. It’s hard to accept some obvious facts.”

  “It is,” he said.

  “I go where I want to go and that’s all I’m going to tell you. That part’s mine and only mine. How’s your mother?”

  “She’s good. She misses me and wants me home. She’s the same old Momma. Can I ask you a question?”

  “You can ask, but I reserve the right to refuse an answer,” I said.

  “You should be a comedian you’re so funny,” he said. “Where do you think the voices come from?”

  “Inside my head.”

  “Again funny,” he said. “Seriously.”

  “I am being serious. I don’t know. I don’t think about those things,” I said.

  “You never question it? You must think about it at times, or at least at first you must have.”

  “No. I don’t, didn’t, never have. When it’s not happening I don’t want to think about it. I would rather do anything than think about them.”

  “You never read anything they say?”

  “Not until recently,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve never wanted to. I
still don’t want to. I sort of feel the need to at this point, but I don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s not an answer that’s going to satisfy. Don’t you see that you want me to act as if I care about them? I’ve spent years wanting nothing more than to get rid of them and live a normal life.”

  “Normalcy is overrated.”

  “Said the normal person. Where do you think they come from, God?”

  “I think I do,” he said. “What else could it be?”

  “Evil?” I asked.

  “They give you a road map to stop evil not perform it.”

  “You think it comes from God,” I said.

  “I don’t know if I even believe in God. I believe in good. I believe there is good and there is bad. We all have the propensity for both. I believe that in the end good wins. I think the crew is what will help good to win.”

  My mind and body went cold. This was the very reason I never thought about the crew or questioned it. I couldn’t live with this fear. I had to push it aside. I had to be on the outside of it, where my sanity lived. If I lived in them, studied them, or questioned their origin that’s when I would lose my mind completely. I’d be nothing more than their puppet. “I can’t talk about this.”

  “I promised I wouldn’t do anything behind your back,” he said. “Full disclosure.” He sat on the bed, opened his laptop and signed onto a website. “This is my site.”

  The homepage was identical to the cover of the book with, Patient: Crew, written in black letters across the middle of the page. There were four tabs that ran along the bottom: about us—the books—the prophecy—the testimonials. He clicked inside each and let me view portions of them. The books were transcribed in their entirety, which I’m sure the publisher didn’t like. The prophecy area was a meeting and study place that allowed everyone to give their interpretations of what the crew had written. Another section was filled with testimonials, and news reports of what the crew had foretold. There were twenty-seven thousand, one hundred, and seventy-five accounts.

  “This is what I need you to see.” Kevin clicked on the tab labeled, about us. There were five caricatures with bios attached to each. Fat Boy was at the top of the page, and looked a little like the old cartoon character Fat Albert. His bio read; Fat Boy is a founding father of the crew search team and a self-proclaimed crew maven. The other four leaders had similar bios, and their caricatures looked like typical skinny white nerds. The only difference between them was their shirt color and shape of their glasses. They all went by their screen names. Alpheus6824, Megame, Durgin007 and Braindead1.

  “You created all of this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t create it Megame did,” he said. “He produced the website and we all contributed the content, but none of that really matters. What’s important is that you know these are the people I sent the pages to. These are the people that can help us.”

  “I thought I told you to keep it to yourself. No sharing.”

  “That was before the school bomb. I told you then we needed help. I can’t figure this one out by myself.”

  “Who are these people? All you are showing me is cartoon characters.”

  “We use the avatars for security so no one will know our true identities. Let me show you.” He clicked on a little floating C at the bottom of the page, and a screen popped up that required a password. He typed it in, and that led to another page that required yet another password. It opened up a white web page that housed pages of the crew books rearranged and spliced together like pieces of a puzzle.

  “Kevin, did you know who I was when we met?”

  “No one knows who or where the crew comes from.”

  “Do these guys know?”

  “No. Not that they aren’t begging me every second but no I didn’t tell them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I got your back,” Kevin said. He pecked on the keyboard and the screen ran quickly through different pages, and finally settled on another web page that asked for yet another password. “Can’t be too careful. Here’s where I download the new pages, the unpublished ones. The other Crewbies agree that these writings are much different from the published ones.”

  “Crewbies?” I asked.

  “That’s what we call ourselves.”

  “How are the writings different?”

  “It’s hard to say because we are just now able to compare them. The books are redacted. Words are taken out and at times whole phrases. They seem to be edited with great scrutiny.”

  “Do you think Tim and Marla edited them?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “What reason would they have for doing that?”

  “Maybe they knew the sessions were prophetic, or maybe it’s something as simple as an editor wanting it redacted because of space.”

  “Marla never discussed the publishing process. I didn’t see what she did with the notebooks after I gave them to her.”

  “What did y’all do with the money from the book sales?” he asked.

  I looked away. I wasn’t disturbed by the question. I was bothered by the realization—my realization—of how little I actually knew of what had been going on around me for ten years.

  “It’s ok its personal I get it,” he said.

  “No I don’t mind,” I said. “The truth is I don’t know. It was Marla’s book. I guess she kept the money. I was always taken care of, and never wanted for anything. Tim set up an account for me in Sunny. I’ve got money. I guess I never had a reason to question anything, but now I feel a little stupid.”

  “Live and learn baby, live and learn,” he said.

  “But that’s my point I’ve not done either.”

  “You need to get your head out of your ass when it comes to your writings, but other than that you’ve led a pretty amazing life. You’ve changed lives. The things you’ve allowed yourself to write have saved people, and kept other people from doing the wrong thing—really bad things—and even made a few people rich.”

  I wanted to throw up. “I don’t care. I never wanted any of this, and didn’t ask for it. I’ve always thought someday it would all go away. I thought if I wrote enough if I allowed them full access it would—someday—go away but the way you talk I know they’ll never leave me. This is all I’ll ever be.”

  “You can have a life. They don’t take up all of your time,” he said.

  “Alone maybe, but what good is life without someone to share it with?”

  “You don’t have to be alone.”

  “I can’t bring anyone else into this. I can’t put this sort of burden on anyone. No one should ever have to live like this.”

  “Jim loves you. He wouldn’t think that life with you was a burden.”

  “I can’t, he deserves better. Jima deserves better. She needs a normal life.”

  “There you go again with all that normal talk. Normal is boring. Average is just that, average. There is nothing special about nothing special. You should give him the choice. You owe him that.”

  “I don’t owe him, and I’ve made my choice. He’s not involved. Understand? It’s my business don’t interfere.”

  “Yes’m I knows my place.”

  “Don’t be that way. I wasn’t being bossy.”

  “Everything is always so cut and dried with you.”

  “I think I get that from Tim. He wasn’t a friendly type.”

  “That’s the other thing I meant to tell you,” he said. “I looked on every news site, every search engine and nothing not even a blog blurb on the car explosion at Tim’s house.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means that it’s gone pretty high up the ladder, and someone is blocking the information.”

  “Government?”

  “Ours and possibly others. It’s not easy to completely block information from the Internet, but it can be done for a price and for the right people. This didn’t come from the CIA alone this came from higher up. Maybe even the Whiteh
ouse.”

  “I think that’s a little dramatic. I’ve seen Tim make a lot happen from his laptop at home. What would the White House want with the crew?”

  “What wouldn’t they want? You don’t realize it, but you have the keys to the kingdom in that pretty little head of yours. Anyone would love to have a little chat with you, and the crew.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like that at all. I don’t ask them things they don’t tell me things. I can hardly even understand what they’re saying when they talk all at once. Something somewhere in my brain can decipher it. I can say it out-loud or I can write it down, but I can’t simply tell you what they say.”

  “Have you ever tried?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not that you can’t, it’s that you won’t,” he said.

  “I don’t. I can’t imagine ever talking to them as if they were human or alive.” Kevin closed the laptop, and we sat in silence for a minute or two. My eyes were heavy. It was just a few short hours until I would meet Tim at the airport.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  “What if the government watches your site?” I asked. “They could have read everything you’ve transcribed and already know who you are. If those were agents talking to people in Sunny do they know who I am?”

  “They weren’t asking about you.”

  “But you don’t know do you? You said you didn’t talk to them.”

  “I know because of how everyone reacted to their questions. They weren’t talking about you. Get some rest.” He reached into his back pocket, pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “I’ll never change my email address, and I will always make myself visible one way or the other. I will do everything in my power to make it easy for you to find me. I will always be where you need me to be. You have my word on that.”

  “You’re one of a kind Kevin, my number one and only friend. I’ll never be able to thank you for everything you’ve done.” Kevin was the first adult friend I had made outside of Tim and Marla. It wouldn’t be easy, but I would have to force myself to disconnect from him as well.

  “One of these days when you’re safe and settled I want you to tell our story for the website, and the Crewbies. Tell everyone how we met, and how I’m the dark warrior the crew predicted. Tell them I was the one that saved you.”