#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  It’s time for that other smoke grenade. He pitches the grenade into the berthing quarters and it sails right through the transient’s head trailing a purple plume. The transient spins viciously to confront Sid, screaming his banshee scream and blasting wildly with that rifle as smoke quickly envelopes him and pours through the door where the kill team is waiting. Bullets clatter against the bulkheads as Sid takes cover outside the doorway. The transient’s gun runs dry and the monster bellows an angry curse as Sid dives blindly into the berthing racks. He doesn’t make it four feet into the room before he hears the slapping of hands on the deck amidst this haze. Sid reaches for the sounds and fills his hand with a clump of hair, too long to belong to a sailor. He pulls aggressively and yanks Jamie Chan out into the p-way.

  The internet blogger slaps at his hands in a panic until they are clear of the smoke, meters down the corridor.

  “Follow me,” Sid barks. Now that he has located and retrieved Chan, he has a plan in place for escape.

  “How did it get here?” Jamie says. The question would be sensible under normal circumstances, and even now it is not entirely uncalled for, considering they are in the middle of 22,000 square miles of featureless water. The only worthwhile takeaway is that they have now confirmed the transient can truly track Jamie absolutely anywhere.

  “The same way it gets everywhere else,” Sid growls back. He pulls Chan up a ladder into another p-way, then whips them both out through a port onto the weatherdeck where the Master Chief is waiting. The ship’s loudspeaker blares behind them.

  “General quarters, all hands battle stations.”

  “Is it ready?” Sid shouts at the Master Chief. She looks like a deer in the headlights as he tramples over her toward the railing and a collection of lines dangling toward the water. Sid takes a look over the railing, sees one of the destroyer’s rigid-hulled inflatable boats in the water below, and heaves Chan overboard.

  “Are you stupid?” the Master Chief screams.

  “Stupid like a fox,” Sid barks back, before leaping over the railing himself to plummet thirty feet to the boat below.

  He pulls Jamie from the cold black water and starts the small boat’s engine. In a few more seconds they’re zipping away from the Milius at 40 knots toward the hazy illumination on the horizon that gives away the Chicago coastline. Sid looks back and sees a man-shaped shadow like a blackened cutout in the air between them and the searchlights of the big destroyer. He flips it a big finger as it shrinks into the darkness.

  INT. USS JOHN MILIUS - CIC - DAY

  CIC on the John Milius is no more spacious than the rest of the ship, but it is much darker. The compartment itself isn’t so tiny, but all the computer equipment packed into it hardly leaves any leg room, and the lights are turned down about as low as most MMORPG addicts would prefer. About the only thing in the room that is well-lit is the vertical plotting board, which is manned by a sailor with a black grease marker who is writing backwards on the flipside of the glass partition. Bruce badly wants to throw that in Helen’s face, but now isn’t the time. She’s currently next to a ladder outside CIC, engaged in a discussion with the ship captain that includes a lot of fist shaking from both parties.

  Bruce can only make out useless bits like “endangered my crew” and “onboard my ship.” He gets the impression it’s a fairly standard clash of command head-butting thing.

  “I was so stupid,” Mary Sue mumbles from the floor where she was tucked away next to a sailor manning a computer terminal featuring a rather unmistakable green-on-black radar display, complete with beeping blips and sweeping radial trace. They tucked Mary Sue away in this corner while the Navy secured—that’s a laugh—secured the forward deckhouse and stuffed Fleabag away somewhere. Bruce doesn’t think they have a brig on this ship. Maybe they do. It doesn’t matter. It won’t hold the werewolf any longer than he wants to stay.

  “Honey, you’re not stupid,” assures the Master Chief. She offers Mary Sue some hot chocolate from the mess which the girl gingerly accepts.

  “What did you see in there?” Bruce says, knowing that he’s pushing his luck. He probably shouldn’t ask too many questions just yet.

  “Bad things,” Mary Sue says. “It felt like all the bad things.”

  “You guys get anything out of that other sailor?” Bruce asks the Master Chief.

  She shakes her head solemnly. “He’s dead. He ran to the galley and stabbed himself in both eyes with a bread knife right after you saw him.”

  “Shit’s deep.”

  Helen comes through the CIC door seconds later looking put-off. “Well, the captain wants us off the ship,” she says, frowning slightly. “No surprise there. The good news is I don’t think it makes much difference since the transient seems to be able to go wherever it wants anyway.”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly true,” Mary Sue says. “Not the way you mean.”

  “Well he sure didn’t swim here,” Bruce says. “You care to elaborate?”

  “He read somewhere that we would be here. I saw it—a website, or an email.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. You think someone is emailing him directions?” Helen questions, giving off more than a hint of skepticism. “Then how does that person know where to find Jamie?”

  “I know it sounds dumb.” Mary Sue looks down at her hot chocolate in despair. “I’m so stupid.”

  Before Bruce can tell Helen to lighten up on the girl, Dave the dweeby Graveyard analyst pokes through the doorway look for her. “Director?” he says. “I’ve got something on that number.”

  “Great. Spill it. First good news all day,” Helen says.

  “Well there was nothing in any of the American records, or anything we stole from the Russians. Turns out that despite what you see in dystopian science fiction, it is actually quite unusual to tattoo human subjects with serial numbers. Plausible deniability is an issue. The logistics of tattooing large populations are also quite complicated. The Nazis did it at Auschwitz, but nowhere else, mostly because it was so unfeasible. So I gave up on black projects and checked out FBI and Interpol. I came up with something right here in our backyard.”

  “Indiana?”

  “The other backyard. Canada. Last year in Toronto, an unidentified man entered a political rally and shot a regional council candidate to death in front of a hundred people. The killer had a three digit numeric code and two colors on the right forearm. Cerulean, five, eight, two, blue.”

  “That sounds a whole fuckin’ lot like what we’re looking for,” Bruce says. “Weird tattoo, check. Motherfucker doing some prescient shit nobody can explain, check.”

  “Except the police shot that perpetrator dead within seconds of the assassination. The body was never identified.”

  “Great. So we’re back to square one?” Helen says.

  “Not exactly. I know you told me not to look at the remote viewing thing. . .”

  “Oh no,” Helen hangs her head in defeat. “What did you find?”

  “Stargate was a dead end. No connections. What isn’t so well known is that the British government ran their own remote viewing experiments long after the Americans gave up. The brits eventually shut their program down too, a few years ago. I checked out their personnel, and as it turns out, one of the senior researchers from that program now heads a mental health facility in Toronto Canada.”

  “You think this guy just moved his operation across the pond?”

  “I know he did.”

  “How are you so sure?”

  “Because we’re sending him a lot more money than it costs to operate a mental health facility.”

  Helen groans. “This day just keeps getting worse.”

  Bruce laughs. “Graveyard is funding this shit and you didn’t even know about it?”

  “It’s not that simple. Graveyard doesn’t fund research programs. R&D does. It’s a whole other department. This still doesn’t add up. I mean the theory is ridiculous—a remote viewer is what? Astral projecting himsel
f into some kind of monster?”

  “You keep saying that, but the government is still playing this shit way too close to the chest for me to believe remote viewing is impossible. They still got all those documents they never declassified.”

  “That’s not how it is, Bruce it’s—I have access to all those records—even the redactions and the files that were officially lost. I’ve read through it extensively. They didn’t cancel Stargate because remote viewing is impossible, per se. They cancelled the program because no useful information could be collected. That’s not the same thing.”

  “Uh . . . Explain?”

  “Remote viewers are on a spectrum. On one extreme you have the fakers—which is pretty much all of them, because the rarity of actual remote viewers is one in hundreds of millions. As you move up the spectrum, you start to see people who actually do have some ability. Maybe they can feel an area where something bad happened or get general reads of other people’s concealed emotions. Those weaker abilities aren’t useful for much. As you continue up the spectrum there are individuals who can see what playing card is in your pocket, or what song a radio DJ is about to play, or even Vladimir Putin’s bedroom proclivities. The problem is they’re crazy—and the stronger they get, the crazier they get. I don’t understand why necessarily. I’m just telling you what I read, but they shut the program down because it was an immense waste of time and resources. They spent ninety-nine percent of their time interviewing simpletons and cold readers, and the viewers they found are bananas. They’re loopy. Most of them were permanently committed after the program if they weren’t already. Sure, they can technically see anything anywhere, but they’re babbling incoherently most of the time. There isn’t any way to discern if they’re reciting nuclear launch codes or next week’s Showcase Showdown prices. None of it was useful. Never mind at all that remote viewers just view. They don’t appear like ghosts or push people out windows or do . . . whatever that thing does.”

  Helen’s explanation is disturbed by the tinny sound of Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue through her tiny cell phone speaker. She answer the phone hurriedly. “Who is this? Sid? Where are you?”

  INT. CHANEL BOUTIQUE - DAY

  “I’m back on the fucking Mag Mile!” Sid Hansen snarls into a hardline phone over a glass case displaying two Chanel handbags near the center of a vast blank white space. It was the first structure he came to after emerging from the ocean, so he barged in, walked behind the counter and picked up the phone.” I beached the boat, walked through a tunnel under the freeway, and now I’m back here! I fucking hate this place!”

  “Sir,” a wispy woman in a conservative black dress approaches Sid, extending her arm in an admonishing gesture. “Who let you use that phone? I’m afraid you need to leave the store.”

  Sid lowers the phone and glares at her with death flames burning in his eyes. “I do whatever the fuck I want.” He points at the other end of the display counter, which stretches the length of the store. “Now shut the fuck up and go back over there before I hit you so hard it makes your children retarded.”

  The threat works with incredible immediacy. The shopkeeper stumbles backwards on the heels of her pumps. That should buy a few minutes. Jamie Chan wows at the reaction from the other side of the counter. “I can’t believe that worked.”

  “She’ll be back. They always think they can come back with help. They’re always wrong.” Sid puts the telephone back to his ear. “You guys still on the boat?”

  “For now. We’re being evicted as soon as the choppers get here. We might have a lead on that serial number you saw on the transient’s arm. Bruce thinks it’s promising, but I’m not convinced. There’s something else you need to know. The transient can do something else. Something we didn’t know about before.”

  “Like a handstand?”

  “He shot black rays out of his eyes and made two sailors crazy. It reduced them to total psychotic breakdown. They killed themselves, Sid. I’ve never seen anything like it. Mary Sue was a few feet away when it happened and she’s acting kind of loopy now.”

  “Loopy?”

  “She was talking about dead puppies. We gave her some hot cocoa and now she’s just saying a lot of stuff that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t think she’ll be of much help for a while.”

  “Great. He has gibbering madness eyes. That just made my day so much better.” It did not. It made Sid’s day worse.

  “Gibbering madness eyes?” Helen questions. “Is that a real thing? Or are you joking?”

  Sid sees the huffy shopkeeper coming back his way and pointing him out to a dapper looking man with a waxy bald head. “I’m going to keep the ladyboy moving. I have to go now, or I’ll have to shoot my way through the Chicago Police.”

  Sid hangs up the phone just as the bald headed Chanel manager opens his mouth. “Sir, you’re not even close to glam enough to be in here. You need to leave.”

  Sid fractures this man’s skull against the white paneling inside the display case. The glass might as well have been single-ply toilet paper he went through it so easily. Sid rips the telephone receiver from its outlet and throws the whole boxy plastic unit at the tattling shopkeeper. It sails five meters through the air and directly into her screaming face, where it crashes and cracks with a loud dinging. She flops off those heels and tugs one of the store’s fine upholstered stools with her on the way to the ground. She doesn’t get back up.

  There is only one witness, a solitary early shopper who stands slack jawed at the far end of the beige carpeted show floor. Her Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte rattling in her well-manicured hand.

  “You didn’t see shit!” Sid growls, pointing from across the store.

  “I didn’t see shit,” the shopper agrees.

  “Good,” Sid says. “Come on.” He orders Jamie out the door behind him. They need to move quickly. Promises not to talk are rarely kept long, and someone else is likely to wander in here soon anyway. They head out into the street and turn the corner onto Michigan, heading for the subway station on Chicago and State.

  “Did you just kill those people?” Jamie asks, still in a quiet state of shock.

  “Nah,” Sid dismisses the idea. “Those are just head injuries. Nothing a few months of painkillers and physical therapy won’t fix.” He moves on to the next topic without giving Jamie any time to process that information. “Here’s the deal. The evil black helicopter guys have a message from the future that says somebody named Wyatt is going to cause the end of the world by doing the same kind of shit you’re doing.”

  “Promoting transgender rights?”

  “Sure. I guess. No? I don’t know. I shoot people and blow stuff up. I don’t really handle the philosophical bits too well. Anyway, the transient thinks you’re Wyatt, and that’s why he wants to kill you. Are you Wyatt?”

  “No! That’s insane! All of this is insane! What do you mean a message from the future? Like with a time machine or what?”

  “Either that or they got my ex-girlfriend in on a really elaborate prank. Which do you think is more likely?”

  “Time travel message from the future or ex-girlfriend prank? Uh . . . Ex-girlfriend prank.”

  “You haven’t been doing this long enough. It’s the time travel thing. That’s definitely more likely.”

  “The New World Order thinks I’m this Wyatt too? Is that why I’m on a watch list?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I don’t even know anyone named Wyatt!”

  “Yeah. I told them you’re not smart enough to be Wyatt, but I don’t think they believe me.”

  “Thanks, I guess?”

  “Anyway, we’re all pretty sure whoever really built the codification engine for BuzzWorthy is the real Wyatt. I think if we can find him, we can sic the transient on him instead of you. Seeing as he’s invincible, unstoppable, and can find you anywhere, that’s pretty much your only hope. Too bad you don’t have a clue. . .”

  “The IP address Mary Sue found i
n the system!” Jamie belts out. “Do you remember it? You remember everything, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I remember. You think it belongs to Wyatt?”

  “It has to! Nobody else had access to the system that isn’t already dead. I know a hacker who can trace that IP too!”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  “The only problem is I don’t think he’ll want to help us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a terrible person.”

  “I think I can probably persuade him.”

  EXT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY

  Bruce is in another helicopter packed with commandos again. He wonders where Graveyard gets these things—or rather how they get them so fast. This chopper, a Blackhawk, came and picked him up from the pad at the rear of the John Milius only an hour after Helen’s argument with the ship’s captain. Now they’re zipping through Ontario with an apparently fake insane asylum framed in the cockpit window. When the chopper is almost over the building, Fleabag starts issuing commands to his operators.

  The chopper touches down in a big square patch of frost covered grass in front of the main building, then disperses as soon as all of the hard-asses with automatic weapons have their boots on the ground.

  Helen and Bruce follow the machine gun patrol up to the facility, which is an older three floor red brick building incorporating some stone work around the doors. A tapestry carved into one of those door frames identifies the building as a school, which it is not.

  Fleabag is making hand motions directing his hard-asses where to enter the building when a man in a white lab coat marches somewhat unexpectedly through the front door with his hands up. He has a thick white beard like Santa Claus and a voice to match.

  “Graveyard?” he shouts. “Come on in. We’ve been expecting you.”