Alien Caller

by Greg Curtis

  “It turned out he’d never wanted a helicopter, or a lawyer. He didn’t consider himself to be in any great danger, or his actions to be a crime. Rather he considered the court the criminals for daring to judge him. And anybody else who got in his way. After all he believed himself a god.”

  “He defended himself in the trial, but it wasn't what you would call a defence. Chained to a metal chair, heavily bandaged from his wounds when he was recaptured, he proceeded to tell the entire world about how much he’d enjoyed his reign of terror. About the way it felt so good to see the life drain out of someone’s eyes, to feel the blood running through his fingers, to hear the screams and enjoy the taste of human flesh. But he wasn’t confessing, he was boasting. Again it’s all on public record, though most of it is restricted access due to the graphic nature of his testimony.”

  And you should know that when it came time to argue for his life, he refused. He laughed at them. He told them to try. Dared them. He knew even then that he was in no danger.

  “Against any amount of public protest the sentence was carried out. A tiny little teenager, he was barely fifteen then, he was taken in chains and strapped into the chair and the most deadly poisons were pumped into his veins. He should have died. There should have been no way he could have survived. He was even pronounced dead. But it never happened. It never bloody happens.”

  “The CIA saved him first, changing the poisons and rewiring the equipment so he’d survive, falsifying his death certificate, and whisking him away to a secret base. They thought he’d be grateful, and the chance to have a certified psychopath on their payroll was too good to miss. They treated his illnesses, counselled him, and trained him as an assassin. They thought they could control him, use him. They should have known better. No one can ever control him.”

  “The first signs of trouble should have been when the judge, the jury, the entire court and sheriff’s department, not to mention all the witnesses at his trial, disappeared. And their families. Their bodies popped up months later, one by one. All were brutally murdered, after being horribly tortured, and they were all raped. Their partners and children too. And the evidence, the DNA trail lead straight back to him. You see he didn’t mind confessing to his crimes, he doesn’t consider them crimes. But they had attempted to try him, to pass judgement on him, on a god. Worse still they’d chained him. They had locked him up, restricted him. None of those things could ever be allowed.”

  “Even when they finally did figure out that he’d been out murdering more civilians while they were still training him, the CIA still kept him alive. Still trained him. Still tried to use him. And they hid his DNA records to cover their tracks. It wasn’t just self-preservation, though in truth they couldn’t afford for anybody to know they’d kept him alive. Not when a hundred and eighty more innocent people were dead because of it. There was also a desire to use him. They’d spent a fortune on him, and they still thought they could control him. Naturally he told them he’d be good, and they believed him. Despite all the evidence to the contrary they believed him. They always believe him.”

  “It cost the agency more than they would ever have imagined possible over the next few years. He destroyed their operations, punished them for saving him, and killed their own men, one by one. Sometimes more than one at a time. Some of my friends were among them.”

  “All the time, he feigned innocence, and they couldn’t accept his guilt. It was simply too monstrous. Too insane. He seemed so civilized, so innocent, and even a dog knows better than to bite the hand that feeds it. Even those who guessed it was him couldn’t prove it. He was too cunning. And so his second reign of terror went on and on.”

  “Five years later he was still a contract hitter for the CIA, and also making a fortune selling national secrets on the side when we finally caught him out. He was bright, fortune always favoured him, and he might have got away with it, if we hadn’t turned an enemy agent. I turned that agent. It wasn’t hard as the man was truly terrified of Dimock. All he truly wanted was to be locked away somewhere safe. He would have confessed to anything simply to get away from him. If we’d had any sense we should have been just as frightened. But we weren’t. We were fools.”

  “From then on his death was certain or so our bosses promised us. After all he was just one young man barely even twenty. There was nothing special about him then. How little we understood.

  “More than fifty men died trying to bring him in the first time. It was just a simple little operation and back then he had only normal human strength while we had military assault troops and the advantage of surprise. The best of the best, all armed to the teeth. But he had booby traps galore and weaponry beyond our wildest dreams. Weapons the CIA had paid for. Weapons his enemies had attacked him with. He fed them to us. I was the agency liaison for the operation. And I was the one who had to tell the generals, my bosses and so many grieving families how badly it had all gone wrong.”

  “The initial assault party was wiped out. He’d mined all the land around his base for miles, and filled it with concealed automatic weapons, and with that he herded us like sheep into a gully. There, with a dozen concealed mini-guns he simply cut us down like tall grass from a hidden bunker, laughing all the while. Of perhaps seventy soldiers and myself, less than twenty of us made it back alive. And to our eternal shame we had to leave our fallen behind, or die with them. The only reason any of us made it out at all, was that he wanted to wound us rather than kill us immediately. So he could have some fun before we died. So he strafed our legs while we ran.”

  “Those that we had to leave behind and who didn’t die immediately, and there were quite a few, he tortured for fun, while we regrouped in hospitals and meeting rooms. He even sent video tapes of his kills to their families. Graphic tapes which showed the things he did to their loved ones. You cannot imagine the shame we felt and which we deserved for that.” Which didn’t come close to the shame he felt every time he saw any of the families after that, and then had to ask them, practically beg them, never to tell anyone of what they’d seen.

  “After that he disappeared, but not before he sent out a wave of parcel bombs around the world, just for fun. He’d apparently decided that he no longer needed to hide his deviancy. Not when the agency already knew what he’d done. Thousands were killed and injured, most of them completely unrelated to anyone he’d ever met. Housewives, children and even vicars all paid the price of our failure. It wasn’t revenge, or anger, or even blackmail. He just liked the thought of killing total strangers. The only reason he stopped was that it wasn’t satisfying enough. He couldn’t see and hear his victims dying, feel their blood flowing between his fingers, or taste their flesh. Seeing it on the news was good but not good enough.”

  “The second assault two months later at his alternate base was an all out offensive with hundreds of highly trained soldiers armed to the gills and supported by major air and sea cover. Even that was barely enough. And too many more good men never returned home. But we got him. I only wish we’d killed him then and there. But we didn’t. I didn’t. I’ll regret that till my dying breath. I had the chance to kill him then, and I let him live. The army wanted him tried and convicted for the loss of so many good men and the way they had been tortured. The CIA, already in hot water and facing a closed door congressional hearing for their role in his survival after being executed, had to obey. So did I. Orders from the top. But at least for a while, he was restrained. He was kept in chains while he was tried and sentenced to death, for the second time.”

  “But once more he cheated the death he was due, when someone from DARPA grabbed him from the firing squad. For medical research so they claimed. They promised he’d die, but that at least they’d get something from him before then; medical information that could help our soldiers, the understanding of what made him so dangerous. It wasn’t worth the lives of those who’d already died, but it was something. Even then I knew in my heart he’d escape. He’d cause more suffering. But I so wanted to b
elieve them. And I had to obey.”

  “Unfortunately, as with everything else, he didn’t die. Instead he was put in a DARPA super-soldier programme and it worked. Of the hundreds of prisoners in their trial, ninety-nine plus percent died, went mad or were rendered permanently crippled. Dimock survived. He was the only one. He even survived procedures which were meant to kill him.

  But he didn’t just survive, he flourished. Every surgery, every treatment, every drug, without fail he not only survived but benefited from. The same as he had as a child in the hospital. It was as though he won the state lotteries, not once, but seventy or eighty times in a row. And that’s not in any public record. That’s the testimony of those few that survived his original escape from their centre. There were only a handful, and they never wanted to admit what they’d done. But they also wanted new identities and safe places to hide, and they knew he was coming for them, and so they spilled everything they knew. I have copies hidden in my computer files. They begged us to kill him. I only wish we had been able.”

  With the operations Dimock grew stronger than anything they’d ever expected. Anything they could even believe possible. They had thought in terms of him becoming a very strong man. But he wasn’t a man to begin with and what he became was something far stronger and more dangerous than any creature that had ever lived on Earth. And the stupid scientists thought it was a triumph. He was their shining golden child.” He wondered if they’d still thought that when he’d rung their necks.

  “Again they thought they could control him no matter how strong he got. They’d implanted control devices in him, and things that could kill him. But when they finally tried using them in their desperation as their friends were being murdered and tortured all around them, they found they didn’t work. One by one they all failed, for no known reason. The pain inducers which should have left him curled up in agony on the floor didn’t work. They worked on everybody else, but not him. Implanted bombs that should have turned his heart and brain into Swiss cheese didn’t go off. The drugs he needed to survive he either found elsewhere or stopped needing. Poison gases which should have been totally lethal didn’t seem to affect him. The chains they used he broke. Everything failed. The scientists had thought they could control him. Instead they lost an entire research facility as he escaped. Three hundred and seventy four more people, butchered. All on tape as well. I have copies of all those records as well.”

  “Then, pursued by agents from every covert organization in the country, he led a trail of death and destruction across the States until he finally escaped completely. Over two hundred more civilians were killed as he stole cars, money and anything else he wanted. That too was covered up and those who died were never given the true respect they deserved. Instead of being admitted as true murder victims, most were listed as killed in accidents. Coroners and police departments were subverted, the press was locked up if they dared put two and two together, and even the local politicians were ham strung. But again I have the records.”

  “From there it was all downhill. Dimock escaped first to Mexico, and then on to Asia and the North Pacific, where he murdered practically everyone he met. He went from international terrorist to arms dealer and random mass murderer. Trap after trap was set for him by all the agencies as well as armed forces. He escaped every single one, and always always killed more people than God. All of it was covered up, explained away as acts of nature or terrorists bombings, but all the while it became harder and harder to hide his evil.”

  “Yet what he did to the American forces sent against him was as nothing to what he did to the foreign powers who hired his services. They wanted a terrorist and they got one. Time and time again they paid him good money, and he repaid them with blood. Their own. They too, sent out army after army to get him. We have no idea at all how many of them died. But we found at least a dozen mass graves on just one of his island hideouts, the smallest with over six hundred bodies.”

  “We have absolutely no idea how many more of those are out there. What we do know is that free of the CIA and the DOD’s control and with all the money he could want, he decided to go on a life long holiday.”

  “He spent months at a time on hunting missions in China, all through Asia, and the former Soviet territories, destroying whole towns, and then taking on their armed forces when they finally arrived. For him it was like being on safari while the governments, desperate to stop mass panic and not implicate themselves in his crimes, had to try and cover up what had happened. Mostly they blamed natural disasters, terrorists and rebel insurgencies.”

  “In between times he returned to the States to track down and kill everybody who’d ever tried to do him harm, or even good. Of the twenty soldiers or so and myself who survived the first assault, only myself and two others still live. Mainly because we were overseas when he struck. The generals died and so did most of those who had waged the second assault on him. Their families too.”

  “Until then I’d only been one of a number of people he wanted to kill. But that all changed nine years ago when I was forced to kill his psychopathic half-brother to save a city. He was trying to destroy Washington. He had planned to gas them with a powerful nerve toxin that his brother had obtained for him. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he left me with no choice. And ever since then I’ve moved up to the number one slot on Dimock’s hate list. This is not his first attempt to kill me. Not by a long shot.”

  “His first direct strike on me was in an apartment block in Turkey. I was scheduled to meet an informant on the seventh floor, but my car broke down and I was late. I arrived by taxi, just in time to watch the entire building disintegrate in front of me. One hundred and thirty people, all dead in my place. Terrorists were blamed by the government I believe. They were nearly right. The only thing they got wrong was that in reality there was only one.”

  “Dimock made two more strikes against me, and each time hundreds of others paid the price. I only survived by virtue of the fact that I had learned how to hide extremely well and had some dumb luck. Hill is not my name, though I’ve worn it now for over a decade. I was originally David Bennett. This is not my face either. I’ve had extensive plastic surgery. Even my voice and my fingerprints were changed. The same ruse wasn’t enough to protect my colleagues. The other agents who’d been with me on the capture of his brother. They’re all dead along with their families, and he went to new lengths to torture them. And to show us how he did it. The longest of them lasted nearly three weeks under his care. I am again the only survivor and his most precious target.”

  “Finally, five nearly six years ago he was captured in a sting operation after he’d tried to obtain some nuclear weapons. It had nothing to do with his gun running. He wanted to use them. It wasn’t about power or money, it was about killing. Nothing could have made him happier than watching cities burn at his command.”

  “More than a thousand men took part in that, as they trapped him in an island warehouse, and started blowing the building apart around him. Missile after missile went into that structure, until finally what was left was a pile of rubble no higher than a foot stool. Then they opened up with the daisy cutters and actually started melting the ground for mile after mile. Imagine their surprise when three days later they dug him out, and he still had a pulse. Nothing could have survived. But he did. He was officially brain dead, had been without air for several days, yet he still had a pulse.”

  “We should have killed him then and there. God knows we tried. I tried. Orders or no orders. But I was locked up before I could get to him with the napalm. I was accused of disobeying orders. They would have tried me too if there hadn’t been so many other attempts. Generals as well as privates. We all knew he had to die. But as always some well meaning fools protected him.”

  “Instead while at least fifty of us were held in make shift prisons, anything to keep his comatose broken body safe from us, yet another agency, this one without even a name they would share with us, not even the DOD, grabbed his suppo
sedly broken body at gunpoint, to study. They said they’d dissect him, and we prayed it was true. But even then we knew it wouldn’t happen. It never happens.”

  “Instead yesterday? Last week? He escaped. Heaven alone knows how many are dead this time, and he seems to be even stronger than before. Whatever they’ve done to him this time, it’s only served to make him stronger, again. I maybe could have killed him, maybe, if he’d only been at the same power as before. But he’s not. He’s more powerful than ever, and even if my defences hadn’t been compromised I would have lost. Even so I must have done him some terrible damage. Maybe enough to cripple him, maybe even more.” He remembered Dimock’s body on that table beside him, and knew at least some of why he was there was due to him.