Brikker drew on his cancer stick, savoring the moment.
Then he burned her again, drilling it into her. When it was over, he slipped away and lit up another.
“Jesus, God,” the man pleaded.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Brikker shouted among the wails. It was impossible to know if he was grinning, but he was. This would be child’s play, and he was certain there would be no call for even a single injection of truth serum with this one. Still, administering a fatal dosage of that magic elixir, LSD, a favorite of one of his counterparts in the CIA and far more effective than sodium pentothal—after every drop of information had been extracted, every scream had been bled, of course—held its appeal. It was quite a sight watching the mind collapse like that just before death, not unlike watching bullfrogs flitter and flop and explode when pumped full of air, a game he used to play as a curious child, a game where he first learned the joys of how it was to inject living things, to make them do what you needed them to do. No, unlike the woman, who had endured countless injections and episodes of uncontrollable laughter and vomiting and the occasional seizure, there would be no need at all. Pity.
Brikker spoke curtly, like a father asking a child of the dollar missing from his wallet.
“His name.”
“… I think it was Rawlings.”
“Rawlings.”
“I think so … only heard it the once. Maybe Rawthorne. Somethin’ like that.”
“Rawthorne.”
“Don’t hurt her no more, okay? Okay?”
Brikker beat him. Metal knuckles.
The lesson had only begun.
For the next two hours he circled the chair in calculated steps, moving in and out of the shadows, repeating each and every digit. And with each and every digit came the lashes, one upon one, from a length of barbed wire.
“Chivalry has no place here,” Brikker told him. “You have no person here.”
The man bled a river, his body ripe with welts and gashes. He could barely speak. His eyes listed as if he were drugged.
When asked for his name the answer displeased. The digits had come as they had from the woman, spoken only to avoid punishment. But they had come.
“Now,” Brikker said, his will to break this man as unbreakable as iron. “Tell me about Rawlings.”
~ 3
Ronald Jackson Jacobsen, a truck-driving, chain-smoking, church-going family man, a man who would cheat a stranger at stick but give you the shirt off his back, maybe even a nice, big Buick—spoke weakly, words coming, words fading. He had lost all trace of that fine Missouri graciousness he would offer so genuinely to friend or to foe; no Sir for this good Doctor, no sir. Still, he spoke gamely given his condition, regaling his captive audience of two of how he had picked up a drifter in a late-October rainstorm. How they had stopped at a roadhouse; how the man on the screen had hustled him.
How the world had gone black.
“You see how it was?” he went on. “You see how it was? He could … could—”
The man spiraled into a body spasm, and Brikker watched with mild interest. It was not unlike the reaction when charged cables were applied to the genitals, where the vast majority would scream long after the clamps had been pulled away, some so loudly they must have believed their brains were bursting. A good number bled profusely from the ears and nose, some the anus, while others simply succumbed. Some fought it, endured it, just as this one was enduring it, as if in their delusion they might somehow steel against the agony. Their efforts failed without fail.
The man stirred as the pain ebbed. Blood dribbled from his lips. A drop slipped to his doughy chest and formed a neat little splat where his heart was.
“I know how it sounds,” he said, struggling. His eyes probed the shadows, like a lost child in dark woods who has heard the sudden snap of a twig. “He … he turned back time.”
At this the woman groaned, as if she believed not a word—as if this nonsense would serve them both swift punishment. He looked to her for some level of belief, only to be met with tears. Eventually his gaze shifted from her, slipping back to the astonishing image of the man who had sentenced them to this hellish end.
“He cheated me,” the man said. “Maybe I was cheatin’ him, too, just a little, but … but what he done—”
The man cringed. The bleeding had eased, but not nearly enough to stay the inevitable. Moments passed, and only when the pain permitted did he speak, laboriously, as if the words and the images wedged into his brain were heavy bricks to be carried up a long, steep hill. He offered a naïve expression that begged for some kind of assurance from his captor he would be rewarded for his forthright, perhaps even released. When nothing of the kind came he simply continued his story, telling it to the darkness like a man confessing through a small window, to a priest he believes is listening.
“I was scared like I never was,” he said, and nearly stopped there. He paused to swallow. “But what scared me most was when it all went black.”
~
At the precarious birth stage—before there was a Project—doubt and disbelief in the highest ranks nearly wrought it stillborn. In the very few privy to the myth of the magic (save one Bulgarian physicist, a man who would yet lose an eye to his not too distant future), to buy into the notion that an old man, an obscure dairy farmer from Down Under, could turn back the clock, was next of kin to madness … and assuredly the fast track to demotion. There would be but one trial, they’d said to the physicist. One.
An atomic clock was synchronized with its cesium-based twin, the twin stored safely out of range at the far east of the continent, in a rather nondescript “bottling plant,” a laboratory in southern Virginia. Placed with the Australian, not a chance was risked, isolating he and the clock in the bowels of an abandoned, and newly converted, silver mine, twenty-three hundred feet beneath the Nevada wasteland. There would be no witnesses (especially the good Doctor, he held no illusion of subjecting himself to a journey through Time until he was certain he would survive the trip), no recorders of any kind (it had to be explained to the stiff-minded Albrecht, more than once, why any recording device would be an exercise in futility), and, to ensure the farmer’s co-operation (and much later, Numbers Two and Three), the man was properly motivated. In addition to the requisite torture and drugs, for every defiance, an Indian child, one of scores taken from various reservations, would be shot. History would record that only the American had refused, and seeing his bluff called before him with a five-year-old Shoshoni girl, had never refused again.
And so the singular trial took place. But then another. And another. Upon completion of each “Proof of Concept” experiment (the duration growing from a single second to several), the clocks in Virginia and Nevada would be compared and, without fail, would be precisely—and impossibly—out of sync.
The magic was real. The Project was born.
In the next phase, Brikker introduced new variables into the equation. He placed organic material—fruits and vegetables, plants and bugs—with the Australian, and when tomatoes remained tomatoes and cockroaches remained cockroaches (although the insects often appeared darker in color and quite blotchy upon arriving from the past), the stakes were raised. Rats and cats, dogs and monkeys, were hauled in as Turn-fodder. Despite their obvious fear and extreme aggression towards Schenck and Lakeman (and later, Richards), nearly all of the animals had returned quite normal … rats scampering, cats ignoring, dogs tail-wagging, monkeys scratching. There were, of course, unusual side effects (strangely, dogs seemed more susceptible to afflictions of the eyes, while cats and monkeys seemed predisposed to vomiting; rats were curiously unaffected in any way at all), but of the hundreds subjected to the sweeping maelstrom of the Turn, only two had not survived, and only two had arrived, as Brikker had written, “retarded” (which he jokingly referred to as “Animal Crackers,” a term Albrecht had never found amusing in the least). Save these “rare, inconsequential exceptions,” there had been “remarkable p
redictability,” the very essence of the synergistic goals of the military and of the Project (despite Brikker’s fascination with the randomness of new timelines). And so the green light had been given.
On that first day of human trials, an eight-year-old Quoeech boy had been lowered into the mine with the Australian. A trip of precisely thirty-seven seconds had taken place, and a subsequent physical examination suggested a child in perfect health. Aided by an interpreter, a psychological investigation over a period of two weeks revealed that the boy seemed quite normal, yet suffered from one “recurring issue.” The issue—the nightmares—had gone unrecorded in Brikker’s official report, but was certainly recorded in his personal notes and scrapbook. In the weeks that followed, test after test exposed intriguing patterns: while most subjects suffered similar physical maladies as the lower animals, it appeared that humans of “lower intellect” suffered the least ills, while those of “mid- to upper-intellect” were prone to nightmares, sleeplessness, irritability, and acute sensations of déjà vu. Only later would the good Doctor realize that his own suffering was nothing of the kind. That the Fates had smiled upon him with an incredible gift called the Sense … but so much more.
And yet, in spite of these unqualified successes, there remained a burning question. Even Albrecht, the military maggot with the military mindset, had been far more than curious; the answer held vital implications for future conflicts. Insect or animal, roach or rat, all subjects killed prior to a Turn had always (with the exception of one mongrel dog) arrived alive.
And so the question burned, until a fine spring day in April. The fourteenth, the day after Brikker’s birthday.
Brikker had submitted his plan to use “expendables,” but Albrecht held no interest in what he called “civilians”—the Indian children. The trials would take place discreetly, one per day, to the expressed maximum; Brikker had been forewarned that even a single failure might doom the Project. And so eighteen men—nine enlisted, nine officers—were “voluntold” to report to Brikker, and eighteen men, not a one the wiser, were asked to sit in the chair set across from the Australian. They had been informed that the experiment would be quick. And painless.
Like the dogs and the monkeys (the cats and the rats had been poisoned), all eighteen were shot in the head. All eighteen rose from the abyss.
Sixteen were treated for mild aches and pains and returned to duty.
One suffered a nasty bout of diarrhea—and returned to duty.
One lieutenant complained of a headache—and returned to duty.
Not one reported any memory of their death, yet a week after the tests concluded the lieutenant slit his own throat. His suicide note, written neatly and soundly, held a touch here and there of the metaphysical, concluding its calm discourse with a curious question: If katydids can dream, can not a dead man take his own life?
Albrecht had simply scribbled FAILURE in his report, had threatened to recommend the immediate termination of the Project. Brikker, on the other hand, considered the tests an important milestone, an unequivocal triumph. Arguing that the “recovery rate” was a perfect one hundred percent, Albrecht had countered that “a fucked-up soldier was as good as a dead one.” To which Brikker countered: “Success … indeed, progress … is not measured purely by lives or by deaths, rather by knowledge gained through experience, by predictability and repeatability.” While he admitted, “there appear to be some difficulties,” this had been but a footnote. The Project, approved beyond Albrecht’s reach, summarily received “indeterminate funding” for “unspecified duration.”
Upon reflection of his early successes, Brikker had mused that, perhaps, the lucky ones had risen from that black abyss retarded; perhaps their God had spared them a greater indignity. He had once described the Sense as a dream that was real (a description he considered quite clever, if not entirely accurate), and while it was one thing to endure the physical trial of time travel, it was quite another to deny the dark insanity of what a post-Turn mind could scream. He had seen the mind come apart, shred from the inside by a fine blade.
Perhaps he was seeing this now.
He studied the man in the chair. Pathetic. Weak. If only he knew enough to embrace his gift, than to choose to spiral into hell.
“I don’t mean the lights,” the man said. “I’m talkin’ about the world goin’ black.”
“Shtop it,” the woman croaked. “Jush … SHTOP IT.”
“Black,” he said, as if repeating it would make her believe. She shut her eyes in tears, and for the next ten minutes, often repeating his words as if to certain himself, he relived the horrors of the Turn. At last he stopped, mesmerized by the glow of the cigarette, drawn by a man he could not see.
“You believe me, don’t you? That’s why you’re lookin’ for this guy, right?”
No reply.
“He’s not human,” the man said, speaking directly to the cigarette. “He—”
The woman pleaded with him to stop, the words rushing out with a slick whistle between her missing teeth.
“Don’t hurt her … please. Please.”
Only Brikker’s breathing broke that mindless tick … tick … tick. He would grant this pathetic gallantry.
The man settled, clearly relieved. “You’re with them,” he said, swallowing, emphasizing the last word like a preacher who has pointed out the demon among us. “The Government.” And then: “He’s one of them aliens you keep tellin’ us don’t exist.”
Brikker drew long on the cigarette. He exhaled, the filth from his lungs drifting into the light like poisonous ghosts.
“And you believe this?”
The man’s eyes scattered for the source of the question. The vile root of that thick and elusive voice.
“I know what I saw.” He regarded the lopped appendages at his feet. “I know what I know.”
Brikker stepped from the shadows. Hard light struck that stark side of his face, revealing cold white skin disfigured with pockmarks; the cut of that sinister black patch where his eye used to be. He placed a bloodied hand on the man’s wrist, and then he leaned in close. His breath was horribly pungent, like rotted cabbage.
“So … what should we do with this … alien.”
“You should kill him.”
Brikker straightened and loomed over the chair. He had cause to grin and he did. “In time … in time.”
“I don’t know where he is. I don’t.”
“Tell me,” Brikker said, pondering that which he firmly believed was the key to fully exploiting the potent Sense he possessed. The key that would take him to heights even Richards dared not dream. “What do you remember about the blackness?”
No reply. But then, he had not expected one. To dance with insanity could prove fatal to the faint of heart and weak of mind. And yet, given the man’s sober reaction—the eyes never lie—the dance had already begun.
He remembers, Brikker thought, a burning urgency rising within him. How it was to be ripped apart, atom by atom. The indignity of being stripped of flesh, raped of bone and blood. How it was to slip between the now and what was, only to be spewed forth as afterbirth from the cold womb of time. He remembers. The endless eons of mind; the dark and the death. He has the gift. Not as gifted as I, certainly, surely not as gifted as Richards … but gifted nonetheless. He will prove most useful.
That urgency pitched to a fever.
Could this one have touched it?
The physician struck another cigarette. He drew it quickly and deeply, then drew it from his lips as he approached the woman. He held it to her left eye, and she began to squirm fruitlessly like a snared animal. Her body seemed a skeleton on the verge of its fragile bones coming apart.
“I wish to know,” Brikker said.
The man pleaded with his eyes. Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t make me talk about this.
Brikker did not ask twice. With three fingers of his right hand, he spread the woman’s eye and held it wide. She screamed at him, at nothing and at any
thing, summoning strength from somewhere inside that spent shell. Wasn’t the mind an incredible thing, he mused, the way it could, between one instant and the next, go from utter capitulation to utter fight.
He burned her. There was a sharp searing sound, far below the real screams now, and a rather sweet smell of burning that was always curious if nothing else. If need be, he would rip the other from its socket with his fingers.
Brikker darted behind the chair and snared the man by the throat. He clenched hard with his claws, choking him.
“Don’t you dare look away.”
The man was blubbering now, tears streaming down his face.
Brikker withdrew to the camera, admiring his handiwork. The screaming would go on and on now, an annoyance he had learned to live with as part of the job, and so he worked efficiently, almost effortlessly, loading film as required, clicking the shutter several times during this bothersome but still useful downtime, catching unique moments of suffering he would later develop and reflect upon, all the while savoring the very cigarette that had provided this opportunity. He waited patiently for the coming silence, and then it came, just like that, storm to calm in an instant, as if the woman’s mind had suddenly snapped from the agony. It was always the same. Her left eye rolled but once and slipped shut, and her right, now horribly misshapen, stood wild and wide as her eyelid flittered uselessly above the charred mass below it. It was a filmy, sunken thing staring blindly into the light; oddly, it seemed trained on the man in the wheelchair, as if laying blame. The Doctor made a final image, and then, moving swiftly to her, gave a slight touch to her throat … and nodded to the tender rhythm of her heart. Amazingly strong, this one.
He stepped slowly toward the wheelchair, each step echoing sharply, like stones upon glass. He kept to the shadows and watched the man sob. Waited for the whimpering to run its course.
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