by David Beers
“So they are,” Will said, his eyes not finding Kenneth Marks’ in the window, but looking out onto the city.
“If I wanted you dead, Will, you would be dead right now.”
Neither of them said anything. Another building went dark in front of them. They were far enough up to not hear any of the sounds from below.
“And if you’re thinking of leaving, when I want you dead, it won’t matter where you go.”
He turned around and Will’s eyes found his for the first time.
“To be honest, I don’t care if you live or die, Will. As long as you play along with me during this operation. If you do what I ask, when it’s over, you can go wherever you want, do whatever you want.”
Will didn’t nod, didn’t move at all.
“What I want is simple. I want you to go back inside Grayson and I want you to make contact with it.”
Will laughed and Kenneth Marks saw the glee touch his eyes. “Didn’t you just say we made contact? I saw exactly what that contact looked like too. If that’s what playing along means, I’ll take my chances on the run.”
“What you saw was an armed force meeting a much more powerful armed force. I’m not talking about you going in there armed, or with aggressive tendencies. I’m talking about diplomacy.”
“I’m not a diplomat.”
“Not for the United States government, no,” Kenneth Marks said. “For me though? That you could be.”
“For you?”
“Yes. I have some questions I would like answered, and if you go in there, and you ask them, and you survive, you have your freedom. I know you won’t give me any America Home of the Free nonsense either, because we both know that you’re not free. That you haven’t been free for a long time, and that you’ve finally met your slave master.”
Will stood up and walked to the television, standing in front of it and facing it so that the blue light lit him up like a Christmas bulb. “So basically, you’ll kill me if I don’t go in there and try to talk to it.”
“Not basically. Exactly.”
“What are you doing with Rigley?” Will said.
Kenneth Marks was quiet for a second, not thrown off exactly, but perhaps having misjudged this man in the slightest way. He registered the question and moved on.
“I’m going to allow her to do what she should have done in the beginning.”
“That’s not what you’re doing.”
The only piece of Kenneth Marks that moved was his chest as it slightly filled with, and then emptied, oxygen. “I’m going to give her a choice similar to yours, both of them for my own purposes.”
Thirty seconds passed in silence, the only change in the room being the television screen flipping through different commercials.
“What do you want me to ask?” Will said.
* * *
Will knocked on Rigley’s door at four in the morning.
He had to knock five times before she finally opened it, but he would have knocked all night if that’s what it took. He was leaving tomorrow morning—in just a few hours—to head back to Grayson, and this might be the last conversation he ever had with someone he knew. He might never have another chance to speak with someone who knew his fucking name, and if he had to wake Rigley to get that, then fine.
He didn’t have to though. She opened the door, the same darkness that was in his room hiding in hers as well. She held the door open with her left hand, a cigarette in her right, the smoke trailing up to the ceiling.
“You got a smoking room?” Will said.
She turned around without smiling, the door slowly closing behind her, but Will caught it and walked in.
“What do you want?” she said. She went to a chair in the corner of the room. The television was on, but muted, shining out across an empty, made bed.
“He’s insane, Rigley.”
She didn’t say anything, just folded her legs up in the chair so that her knees pressed against her chest.
“He’s sending me back in. Alone. No army. No weapons. He called me his personal diplomat. You know no one above is sanctioning anything like this, at all.”
“So?” she said, wrapping her arms around her knees and bringing the cigarette to her lips for a deep drag.
“He’s what this has been about for you, isn’t he? Your slow fall, it’s all been because of him, huh?”
Will watched her stare listlessly into the space before her, her mouth not moving at all.
“He’ll kill you,” Will said. “Or have you kill yourself, or whatever else he can think up. And I don’t get this, how you can just sit here and let it happen?”
Rigley smiled, looking to him. “Oh, you don’t get it? Are you not going back into Grayson?”
He sat down on the bed. “I am.”
She chuckled and looked back to the carpet.
“That’s not what I mean, though,” he said. “I’m going, but I’m not…broken by him. We’re both going to do what he wants us to, because he’ll kill us if we don’t, but there’s a difference between you and me.”
“What’s that difference?”
“He doesn’t own me. I could leave. I could try to run. I’m making my decision to go back in there because it’s the greatest likelihood of me living through this. You’re thinking is nothing like that. He owns you, Rigley.”
Her smiled faded, leaving her staring at the floor like a robot whose power had been disconnected. Will looked at her for thirty seconds or so before standing up, deciding that the entire conversation was pointless.
“You’re naive,” Rigley said, not moving her eyes. “You think he doesn’t own you, or your mind, or whatever the fuck you’ve decided separates us?” She shook her head. “He owns you, you just don’t know it. Your little resistance inside your head, the one where you think you are standing up to him, isn’t even miniscule. It doesn’t exist, Will. You’re going where he wants and you’re doing what he wants, and you’ll continue to until he’s done with you. Then he’ll kill you, the same as me, and then you’ll realize that your mental resistance never fucking existed.”
“What happened to you?”
She looked at him then, a fire as bright as the cigarette in her hand lighting her eyes.
“You, Will. You did. Because now I’m going to have to do it again. He’s going to make me do it here, except even more will die.”
“Do you hate me, Rigley? For Bolivia?”
She said nothing.
“I’m not sorry. I was never sorry about it and I won’t ever be. It was necessary. It made you a better leader, whether you realize it or not.”
“Do I look like a leader to you?” she said.
Stunned, perhaps for the first time since he arrived in Grayson. The answer stared them both in the face. Was she right? Could this all be traced back to him, her whole destruction? He had made her kill that man a long time ago, and neither of them ever spoke of it again. Rigley went on to fame and fortune inside their small world, both of them working together almost perfectly. Until now. Had she been holding on to this, after everything both of them had done since Bolivia? Their life was murder, or at least that’s what Will had accepted.
And yet, what Rigley would need to do next had already broken her.
Because she hadn’t actually killed since Bolivia. Will, and others, did it for her.
“What did you think this was?” he asked. “I don’t understand. We kill so that others can live. What we did in Bolivia was necessary, no matter how much I hated it at the time. You know what murder is because you’ve done it; did you think you would never have to again?”
“You murder because you don’t understand life. I do. Because I’ve had it inside me. You, you’ve never held it and you’ve never fathered it, so you can’t appreciate it.”
Rigley looked back at the floor, away from Will. Maybe she was as crazy as Marks. Ten plus years and she had been dreading this day, and she cast all the blame on Will. For making her shoot that single man before she gassed th
e rest of them. Will had come here hoping…maybe just for some connection, but he saw that Rigley was too far past that. She had gone deep inside her own head, to some dark place that maybe he helped create, but one that she wouldn’t find her way out of.
“Good luck, Rigley. I hope you find yourself again, before it’s too late.”
Rigley flicked her cigarette and the ash drifted to the floor, like a ghost finally realizing it needed to die.
91
Rigley's Mind
Rigley stood in front of the last door built on this level of her mind. She had been through the other two, seeing her daughter, seeing the man that she gunned down while he pleaded with silent hands.
The name of the last room rested above the door, hanging with the same red glow that every other thing in this place did. The godlike statue of the man she killed remained behind her, but she wouldn’t turn around to see it again. Not out of fear of the statue, but fear of the other figure behind her. It was a black thing, the same as the room around her, formless, yet she knew it was there. It stood behind her like death, wanting her to turn around so that it could lay its cold black hand on her shoulder.
It wouldn’t let her turn back.
And she knew the thing’s name, even if it looked so much different in this place. Kenneth Marks. Even here, in her mind, he forced her forward, ready to kill her if she didn’t do his bidding. Ready to torture her if she did.
She looked up at the name of the room in front of her.
GRAYSON.
The difference between this room and the other two was that this hadn’t happened yet. That whatever she would see next wouldn’t be in the past, but in the future, and that meant she would look at what her mind thought the world could be. Everything else in here, so far, had been her mind replaying a life drastically spinning out of control, worse than any fighter pilot that swirled down into a burning spectacle of twisted metal.
Now, though, she was going to see something that was pure imagination. Pure creation. Because it hadn’t happened. She was going to be forced to see it, because there was nowhere else to turn—the creature behind her made sure of that.
Her hand moved forward on its own, as if having waited for her to think these thoughts, and now that they passed through her consciousness, it was time to press on. Ever onward in this place of complete emptiness yet brimming with more than Rigley could handle.
She felt the cold doorknob as it twisted in her hand, but the door opened of its own accord, and she was left holding nothing but the frigid air.
Darkness spread in front of her like a feast before the blind.
Her feet moved, slowly, stepping from the past into the future.
In the other rooms she saw things immediately, pictures, and then a statue, but here, she listened as the door shut behind her and yet nothing revealed itself. Just darkness that seemed to stretch for eternity.
This is where insanity is created, she thought. In places like this, where one only has the mind to confront.
Her feet didn’t move her for the first time since she began this journey, a time so long ago that it may have happened to a different person. She flexed her hand and it moved as she commanded it, then she turned her head, her body finally listening to her as it had before she found this place.
This is the future, she thought.
It’s black, she thought.
She stood for a long while, not moving though she could now, hoping that something would reveal itself, that perhaps words would be spoken as they had been in the past. Nothing. Nothing illuminated in red or spoke from the air around her. She was alone. Completely.
In her mind.
Eventually Rigley sat down.
And in the blackness, she began thinking. She hadn’t, perhaps in fifteen years, had a single true introspective thought. The second part of her life had been all external, all onward and upward, until this moment when she sat on a floor that might not even exist.
Rigley thought in this black expanse, even as her body remained seated in a relatively lit hotel room, smoking cigarette after cigarette. She thought dark things, and wondered when all of this would simply end.
92
Present Day
Marks looked to be more creature than human. At least, that’s what Will was coming to think. He sat in the back of a large SUV and Marks sat on the opposite side. The man/creature looked out the window, his arms resting at his sides.
The stillness around him slightly scared Will.
Will had been in places, a lot of them, in which his ability to remain quiet and not move meant life or death. In fact, he thought his capability to do so was probably unmatched in the world, or at most, surpassed by very, very few. And even so, he had never seen someone, nor contemplated his own ability, to sit like Marks did.
The bumps in the road seemed not to affect him, as if the shock absorbers on the car absorbed everything, though the rocking of the car still made its way through Will’s body.
It was as if the man/creature was separate from this world, as if even the laws of physics didn’t apply to him somehow. Will didn’t hide his stare, didn’t try to keep his wonder from the man’s view, though it didn’t appear Marks cared at all. Really, it didn’t appear that Marks even noticed the outside world, except when he decided to—the rest of the time he was somewhere else, though Will didn’t know where that place might be.
“What’s wrong with you?” Will asked.
Marks didn’t move, didn’t even act as if he heard the question. Will glanced to the driver in the front of the car, but the man only looked at the road. Will switched to the woman, Jenna, but she didn’t seem to hear him either. It was as if everyone in this goddamn vehicle lived on another plane of existence, one that was visible to Will, but not reversed.
“Hey,” Will said, turning back to Marks. “I’m talking to you. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Marks turned his head, moving it with the same care that he kept his body still. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not like me. You’re not like Rigley. You’re not even like the two people up there in the front, though they’re doing their best to mimic you.”
Marks eyes squinted. “Does it bother you that someone is different? I’m fairly certain a countrywide memo went out about this, that diversity is not just something that should be accepted, but encouraged. Did you not receive it?”
“No, I got it. Hiring Blacks and Asians and women is what that memo referred to. It didn’t have anything to do with someone like you, though.”
“And what is someone like me? Would you enlighten me, Will?”
That’s what he didn’t know, what exactly he was looking at. Marks looked human, sounded human, and yet something in Will kept screaming he wasn’t. That what was sitting on the other side of the vehicle was as much human as the high school girl that opened the door back in Grayson. Was as human as the alien Will tried to kill a day ago.
“You’re not human,” he said finally.
Marks smiled. “No? Did I arrive from outer space as well?”
“I don’t know if you came from space or a woman’s womb, but you’re not like the rest of us.”
“I wonder what homo erectus thought of the first homo sapiens, sometimes, Will.”
Will tried not to move at the man’s words, tried not to show any reaction—that the implication stunned him for a second.
“You’re the next evolution in humanity? That’s what you think?”
Marks was still smiling as he turned his head to look out the window. “There is a difference between us, there can be no doubt about that. There are others that have been similar to me, but holding onto much more of what makes up you than what I am. I may indeed be the first of my kind, though I don’t know for sure.”
The man was insane. Maybe he was the first of his kind, but that only meant he was the first human being to reach a level of insanity that breached all known previous thresholds.
“Do you even realize how
crazy you are? Or does what you’re saying actually make sense in your head?”
Marks didn’t look back over at him as he spoke. “Let’s have some quiet time now, okay, Will?”
* * *
General Joseph Knox had his orders, though they made no sense. An entire division of his military was wiped out today, and in less than three minutes. The dead were still being removed and the cost of the machinery destroyed would total into the millions. What they needed to do was eradicate the entire town, and since they were evacuating the state, perhaps just go ahead and expand the reach of eradication.
Knox hadn’t ever seen anything like the satellite image transferred to his computer. He never comprehended something flying through the sky, surrounded by a kind of green smoke, and choking men like Darth Vader. The Force Choke. That’s what they called it as kids back in Ohio. He never imagined that something might actually be able to use a Force Choke, and yet there it was, right on the screen for anyone with eyes to see.
Which was why these orders made no sense.
They said to send in one man, and only one man, and then wait.
Knox hadn’t sent anyone else into the Grayson city limits, though he set up bases around the town in one-mile increments, as well as sentries in between each base. Nothing else had ventured out and he wasn’t sending a single soldier inside, not until he was told and had no other options. Nothing in his command, outside of weapons based at a molecular level, would make a dent in what appeared out of the sky. Yet Kenneth Marks sent him the order to wait, that he would show up with the man to send inside the city.
Goddamn Kenneth Marks.
Protocol told General Knox he couldn’t skip a level up to Marks’ boss; Knox had never attempted something like that before, and he didn’t know anyone else who had either. The military followed a strict chain of command and that’s what kept men alive. But, this…this new order, this whole setup, made no goddamn sense. Whatever was inside that town, whether alien or machine, wasn’t like anything the world had ever seen. But Knox would stand down and wait, would not send a single person in while he waited.