Invisible Threads

by Michael Hyslip

  I quickly made it to Incite, where it didn’t take long to find Foulker, who’d once thought his status with Matroni made him invincible. I proved him wrong twice now as I stood behind him, shielded, in one of the private rooms where one of the workers danced for him. “Don’t move,” I whispered into his ear, touching the side of his neck with the knife.

  He sucked in his breath, trying to weigh his options and found none of them tipped the scale.

  “I want to know where Matroni is. Now. No one even knows I’m here; no one knows you talked. This is your only choice: tell me now and you walk away intact. Say anything else, you get tortured painfully until you tell me anyway. Matroni will be dead, but everyone will know you talked. Besides, you own him no loyalty since he’s the one who paid me to rob your safe upstairs. Nice aquarium in there, by the way.”

  He whimpered a bit, then nodded. The girl he partied with was too busy dancing to notice anything.

  “Construction site.”

  “I’ve been there before. Where?”

  “It has an underground area only us top guys know about. Center building, inside the main trailer is the access.”

  The girl looked at him funny, trying to figure out what he just said. I had already slipped out the door. Looking back, he was scared and wondered if I was still there. Good. Let him wonder. I exited and made my way toward the construction site with a bag of tools in addition to my freshly reloaded firearms of fun.

  I wanted to punish Matroni and wasn’t about to give him the easy way out. I wanted him to see it coming and feel powerless. I wanted him screaming, going insane with his last breath of unspeakable fear. But what if all that blood with the sweater hadn’t been from Janet? What if she were still alive? I wrestled with this all the way there, torn between impossible choices since I’d not seen a body.

  Binoculars showed perimeter guards with dogs and night-vision equipment, but the dogs were my only concern. The fence had been repaired where I ran through it with a Jeep and didn’t look like there was easy access at all. I pulled bolt cutters from the bag and found the darkest area, where I slowly snipped away a section of fence, pausing any time a patrol was nearby. After fifteen minutes I had a section cut away and was able to quietly slide past it. I walked briskly toward the main building.

  The two trailers still sat there in the gloomy light. I moved to the first one, opened the door, and waited a moment for someone to shoot; then I peeked into the trailer. It was empty, but behind the desk I saw a door built into the concrete and slanted into the slab. It must have been behind me when I’d first woken here after being caught and tied to a chair. Not only did it open and reveal a short few steps, but gunfire ricocheted off the hard steel door, a few pieces hitting my legs as the rounds broke apart. I immediately let go, and the door dropped.

  Hot lead hammered my thighs; thankfully, only the smaller pieces had sprayed me, but it was enough to elicit a scream. My chance at a quiet entrance was gone. The door opened up like one in a cellar, and I had cover as gunfire erupted again. I screamed in pain again, this time hoping it would perhaps cause confusion. Finally, I heard some noise, and a guard lifted his head up to look around like a groundhog. I fired three lethal shots.

  The trailer door opened, and a guard stepped in from outside, rifle at the ready. He was followed by another, and they dropped as I opened fire on them both. Immediately, gunfire opened up outside the trailer, and bullets ripped through the soft metal. I was done for, so I kept as low as possible and fired back into the opening in the floor as quickly as I could site a target. I hit another one, at least, and some extra fire came my way, but the men scattered in an attempt to regroup. A bullet sliced through the trailer and across the outside of my calf, so I staggered down below onto the underground steps to take my chances.

  The gunfire outside suddenly ceased, so I grabbed a dead guard on the floor and took two flash-bang grenades from his belt. I pulled the pins and tossed them toward the door leading outside the trailer—which might buy me time. Jumping into the cellar-like area, I slammed the doors shut behind me and fired a few shots down the hall as one of the guards leaned out only to have his shoulder shattered. But I couldn’t wait around to see what happened. I had to find Matroni, so I kept going and struck the last guard with my pistol, who looked shocked as he dropped.

  As I reached the door of a luxurious room, I saw Matroni himself. He held a revolver pointed at the doorway and wore some strange-looking eye patch. I was shielded, yet as I stepped into the doorway, his eyes widened and he began to fire. The first bullet missed and went into the wall beside me, the second sliced across my ribs beside my left arm. The third hit somewhere behind me, and the fourth went right through my outer thigh, hitting only some muscle. I had my pistol up and fired at his chest, but my own injuries caused the shot to dip lower toward his appendix. The next shot into his shoulder was near the collarbone, and the last one stripped hair from the side of his head. The damage was done, but I still had not delivered enough punishment. He may have been afraid, but I felt robbed of the pain I’d wanted to deliver. He slid to the floor with eyes full of fear and pain, barely alive. He struggled to hold his arm with the shattered collarbone as I aimed my pistol at his throat.

  “Where?” I asked. There was no need to explain I meant Janet.

  Even in this moment he tried to put on a brave face. I’m not sure what it was, but it wasn’t bravado. “You’ll never find her…”

  I fired.

  Matroni was a liar, but he still made me doubt what I’d seen. Was there a possibility she was alive? Either way, punishment had been due, but what if the blood on the sweater wasn’t Janet’s? And if so, where was she? I pushed the questions away, though, because he was clearly just trying to save his own life, and I had to get out of there pronto. My thoughts were becoming jumbled due to blood loss, exhaustion, and stress. I remember being in my vehicle, but not how I got there. And I remember knocking on a door and collapsing.

  Chapter 20

  Consciousness came back in stages, along with pain. I tried to sit up when a hand smacked me across the forehead. “Don’t! I’m not done.”

  Yes, that was definitely Marcy. I could feel my skin moving on my leg and figured she was stitching me up.

  “Thank you,” I said, my voice hoarse and dry.

  “Thank me by answering some questions. You’ve really put me in a bad position. I’m not happy, and Janet will kick your butt when she finds out.”

  Janet… It all came back instantly, a crushing weight of more pain and guilt than I could ever endure.

  “No… no…no….”

  “Shut up and stop moving, I’m almost done.”

  I could feel the tears trailing through the dirt on my face, each side racing to drip to the floor first. I couldn’t hold my emotions in any longer. Marcy finished applying a bandage and placed her hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes and could see I was lying across her couch, pants cut with scissors up my right leg to expose the gunshot wound.

  “Can I get some water?” I croaked.

  “Definitely, and in fact, I demand it. I don’t have anything here for an IV, and you’re desperately dehydrated. Besides, you left me $2,000, so it’s the least I could do, although I’m not sure I want to know how you got that kind of money.”

  She came back with a large glass of water. I sipped it at first, then pulled a couple large swallows. “I know you want some answers, and I’ll tell you more than you bargained for, I’m sure, but you need to know. Janet is…”

  “Don’t you dare tell me she’s gone for good unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Don’t you dare,” Marcy whispered, her voice trembling.

  “They took her, and I…I don’t know. I’m sorry, I tried so hard and feel like I failed her…”

  “What do you mean ‘they took her’? What the heck are you talking about? You mean you found her? Who?” she asked, an incomprehensible shock and pain gripping her.

  I couldn’t look at her. I closed my eye
s and took a deep breath and said, “Peter Matroni.”

  She blinked a few times. “Matroni? The crime guy?”

  “Yes. I didn’t know at first, but then he texted me a picture of her, Marcy. Told me… He told me that he’d have a ‘chat’ with me in a few days. She had been beaten in the photo; they’d already hurt her.”

  Marcy looked at me dumbfounded for several seconds. “Then where are the police?”

  “The police?” I laughed painfully, “The police can’t help. He’d have killed her and dumped the body somewhere. I tried to track her down and found the sweater from the photo in Matroni’s lair. It had a lot of blood, but Janet was nowhere.” I choked up and couldn’t continue. I could hear her softly crying, struggling with how to handle the news.

  “But why couldn’t you call the police? Why did you have to rescue her? And why in the world am I just hearing about this now?” she cried. “I knew I should have called the police when you got here!” Her fists were clenched, and she was shaking.

  “No, don’t! Please! Marcy, there is so much more to this story than even I know, but there are some crucial pieces to this story: I am different, and I’m not sure if it’s in a good or bad way, only that the difference exists, and it gave me a unique opportunity to save her.”

  I held up my hand, not only to ask her to be listen, but I also began shielding just my hand. Her eyes went wide, and I let go of the shielding. She simply looked at my hand, then at my eyes, then back to my hand. So I did it again, and she yelped, jumping in her chair.

  “Oh my God, oh my God! I thought I was hallucinating! This…. This is what you’ve been hiding? Oh no, no, no, so she really did see you disappear the day you came out of the coma, and we had all laughed with her about it!”

  “Yes, and more. Apparently, I have military training, but I don’t remember details. I’ve also been doing…jobs…around the city, using my ability to ‘raise’ cash. It’s been lucrative, but when pursuing a thread of answers about me, I found out that my ability may be due to the existence of nanobots in my body. Some doctor named Bryson introduced more nanobots into my system. He’s apparently the guy who created that institute for research, the IASP. The dude is crazy, but I do think he created them, although there’s still a lot I don’t know, such as how and why I had them in the first place or what their purpose is. But I knew I was the only chance to rescue Janet while invisible because those people are beyond dangerous. I am so sorry I failed, and she might have died because of it, although I think whatever happened to her had been done before I ever got there. I couldn’t leave her there, especially since I learned Matroni also deals in human trafficking. She was taken to the place where he keeps girls—slaves or whatever you want to call them. That’s where I found her sweater covered in blood.”

  I watched her struggle to accept that her friend might be gone forever. Marcy finally looked at me. “I’m not sure I can handle what happened to…. her…. right now, so can you show me anything on your computer that might help me understand?”

  “My computer?” I was confused.

  “Yes, in your backpack. I saw one in there when you collapsed at my door.”

  Matroni’s laptop. “I have his phone too.” I motioned toward the pack, so she quickly grabbed them both, and we began poring over anything we could find. From notes and Matroni and Bryson’s correspondence, I was able to piece together some important information.

  Marcy was checking the phone. “Hey, I found something; it looks like they knew about your ability. They also seem to have found some way to detect it.” She simply looked at me and waited.

  “That’s what I was afraid of. Matroni had some sort of weird eye patch, which I should have grabbed after I killed him, but in his last moment, he tried to convince me that Janet would never be found—maybe meaning I’d never find her. I don’t believe him and think he was just trying to bargain for his life, but it’s still a possibility.”

  Her eyes brimmed, and lips trembled.

  “I saw Janet’s sweater with a lot of blood, but no body. I can’t positively say she is dead based on that alone, but it sure looked bad—no one could survive that much blood loss. Although I’m starting to doubt myself. Maybe Matroni wanted to mess with me at the end.”

  “Okay, I need to process this, but in the meantime,” she said as she held up the phone, “this mad scientist Bryson only says they can detect your invisibility, but no details about how. There were a few texts asking Matroni for updates, but little more.”

  I said, “Bryson was involved with the military, although I can’t be sure if he was forced. Since he’s been able to move around wherever he wants to, it was probably his choice. There are some emails and notes on Matroni’s computer, claiming to have working nanobots and how to overcome some general issues with them. It seems after some back-and-forth, the Army engineers became increasingly interested in what he was developing, because doors began to open quickly for him.”

  Marcy made a bit of an unhappy face at that, adding, “Well, if the intelligence boys were involved, his ‘work’ must be serious. And who wouldn’t want the power of invisibility during war or for espionage?”

  I nodded. “Yes, and he claims he’d already done a lot of the research, but lost it, which is strange. But before I escaped, he indicated that the nanobots he’d given me were automatically reprogramming themselves, and he didn’t like it. It seemed as if he’d recognized some of his previous work, but he certainly hadn’t been anticipating it. Coupled with his comments to the Army about having created nanobots earlier, this situation involves me somehow, but given my amnesia, I have no answers—only more questions.

  “I’ve been having intermittent flashbacks in dreams, and Bryson was there, but I can’t put all the pieces together yet. I was with some type of military outfit, and we breached his research lab. It feels recent, though, like right before I was found in the subway. Bryson was working with some huge, unrecognizable apparatus that was enabling teleportation in some way, which scares me. The ability to move troops behind your enemy’s lines? Past our own borders?”

  I went back to reading Matroni’s phone. “From his notes, it appears the bots in his earlier development trials had been encrypted to lock administrative-control functions so they couldn’t be hacked.” Marcy looked confused and rightly so. “It was after coming out of the coma that I learned I could turn invisible. I call it ‘shielding.’ Matroni was someone I’d done a job for, and it turned out that this IASP project, uhhh, the Institute for the Advancement of Science and Prosperity, was nearly identical to some flashback dreams I was having.”

  She shook her head as if daring things to get weirder. I accepted. “So, I delivered the things to fulfill the job he’d hired me for, but then I went to the construction site where the IASP is building a new complex. Matroni was there, working on a deal with someone who turned out to be Dr Malcom Bryson. Pete was there to take over the union labor by force and get the project construction moving forward. I was caught, and during the Q&A session, this Bryson guy showed up to help get me to talk about a flash drive I’d taken. Bryson put nanobots he controlled in water, and I drank it without knowing. Neither of us knew that I, apparently, already had nanobots in my system! But, during his questioning, he recognized something when they behaved differently than he’d expected. That’s when he started demanding how I had gotten there because the ‘new’ nanobots had lost their programming. He never asked about my ability, so I don’t think they knew about it, which is surprising if he’s the one who made them.”

  She blinked, a bit overwhelmed, so I continued, “I think that means if I already had nanobots in my system, he could only monitor me at that time. The nanobots he just had me drink were, apparently, susceptible to reprogramming by my existing ones. But that begs the question: Why didn’t he already know I had nanobots if he was the only person who had them?”

  “That doesn’t make a lick of sense to me, but keep going,” Marcy replied.

  “I’m still
reading through this…” As I clicked a video file labeled “Bryson related,” Marcy and I were surprised to see a young man (not Bryson) showing little restraint with a stripper in one of Incite’s private rooms. The video paused and showed a circle around the man’s wedding ring and a distinctive arm tattoo.

  “I think I picked the wrong career,” Marcy said, surprising me with a deadpan look. “Come on, I could have been a dancer.” I just shook my head.

  I opened another document in the folder. It felt like I’d hit the jackpot of inside information about the project. Obviously, this young man was military and had been blackmailed into the trade of information. We both rubbed our eyes and began reading more.

  “According to this, the Army also wants the nanobots to initiate advanced healing and, possibly, other enhanced functions. From Bryson’s personal notes, the original batch of nanobots exhibited a problem: their initial reaction to heightened adrenaline could cause them to become stuck in different modes based on a host’s stimuli. He relates my invisibility to this ‘glitch,’ the shifting of light around a localized field, and also refers to ‘perpendicular dimensional traversal,’ whatever that is. He claims I must have come through the portal with him, even though he didn’t see me, which…”

  I faltered, some understanding giving way. “Marcy, this describes my dream, or a possible flashback, about being pulled toward this whirlwind of energy that a scientist was also pulled into. As weird as it sounds, it was Bryson for sure. He had made reference to it when questioning me, and it’s now written here. I don’t understand why or how, but somehow, I alone was teleported to that subway platform, and no idea where he first ended up. The injuries affected my memory. I wish I could find out which part of the world we’d been in first, so I could trace back to where the event took place.”