The Never Army

by Hodges, T. Ellery

  The guards came and went from the door at the front of the shell that was so perfectly shaped it formed an airtight seal. Every time it opened or closed Collin could feel the pressure on his eardrums. For the first few hours neither had spoken out of sheer fear that the guards might walk back in, open their cells and beat them with one of the retractable metal batons they carried. After enough time passed in silence, the courage to test a few whispers had come. When that met with no consequences the two discovered that even if they sang It’s A Small World at the top of their lungs no one seemed to care.

  Despite the appearance of their situation, they had allowed themselves to hope that the normal due process of the legal system might eventually kick in. Those hopes died when Collin asked one of guards pushing a food tray into his cell if they would be given their phone calls soon.

  She hadn’t replied—exactly. She’d just ever so slowly tilted her head, giving him the sense that she found the question comically naive, and she managed to do this while wearing a full-face mask that hid her identity.

  That exchange had occurred last night at what they thought was dinner. A few hours later the lights inside the shell had dimmed, leaving their only illumination what came through Jonathan’s white walls.

  “Guess we’re supposed to sleep now?” Collin had said.

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  Neither had managed to drift off. For one thing, the inside of the shell wasn’t quiet. Most of the time there was an ever-present white noise amid the thrumming vibrations. Had they been consistent, the noise would have faded into the background, but instead the thrumming slowly grew faster and louder over roughly twenty-minute intervals.

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  This acceleration eventually reached a peak, at which point it was too loud for Collin and Hayden to yell to one another. Then it was as though the big black eggshell discharged something, and the process started over again.

  The one person they wished they could talk to, was also the only person these folks wanted quiet. Since Jonathan’s walls had gone white, they hadn’t heard a sound from his cell.

  At first it seemed such a strange petty cruelty. As though their wardens wanted Collin and Hayden to know he was only a few feet away. Later that evening, a worse possibility had occurred to Collin. What if they had it backwards? What if these people only wanted Jonathan to know his friends were there?

  With nothing to do but sit and worry, they often found themselves talking to distract from just those sorts of thoughts.

  “So, do you figure these girls think we’re Magneto?” Hayden asked.

  “It would explain all the plastic,” Collin said. “Wait . . . what do you mean these girls?”

  “Since they took us off the truck, all the folks barking orders or coming into the egg have been women.”

  Collin had to stop and think about it a moment. “Huh, that’s . . . that’s weird isn’t it?”

  “It’s my first kidnapping, so I’m not an expert,” Hayden said. “But yeah, I think it’s weird.”

  “Yep,” Collin said. “Definitely weird.”

  Most of these conversations had ended this way. Some version of, “Yep, weird,” followed by a lull that lasted until one of them remarked on something else that seemed . . . weird.

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  “Does your room smell?” Hayden asked. “Not bad, but like, I don’t know, new car-ish?”

  Collin took a few sniffs. “Yeah, and sterile too.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yep.”

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  “Think they’re watching us right now?” Hayden asked. “Listening?”

  Their eyes wandered over the surfaces as they had a hundred times before, this time looking to spot some surveillance device that had gone unnoticed. Neither spotted anything, and yet they still both came to the same conclusion.

  “Yeah,” Collin said.

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  “Dammit,” Hayden said. “I keep thinking about how weird Jonathan’s been since we found him on the floor that night.”

  Collin didn’t say anything, this wasn’t the first time they had beat their heads on this topic as they tried to make sense out of how they had ended up here.

  “Do you remember Paige’s birthday?” Hayden asked. “What Grant said?”

  “Yeah, that Uncle Sam was watching Jonathan,” Collin said.

  “And all three of us just sat there assuming the guy is bat-shit crazy,” Hayden said.

  “It was Grant, I’m willing to forgive my . . .”

  Collin had trailed off, but Hayden didn’t notice. “I’m not mad at us for thinking Grant was crazy. I’m mad that Jonathan just let us believe it.”

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  “I mean,” Hayden sighed, his voice losing some of its indignation now. “Maybe he thought he was protecting us?”

  Finally, Hayden noticed that Collin had been uncharacteristically quiet for some time and looked over to find his friend was sitting, his eyes telling a story of racing thoughts.

  “Hey, uh, you got something to share with the class?” Hayden asked.

  “I think I know who the mystery guest is,” Collin said.

  There were two remaining chambers on the cell block, one was clearly empty. However, not long after they had arrived, both had noticed that the other appeared to have been occupied. The blanket and mattress disheveled as though someone had slept inside recently.

  “Okay, hear me out. Two days ago, Paige asked me to take her to see Grant at his new place,” Collin said. “She wouldn’t tell me why. I just got the feeling she didn’t want to go alone. Thing is, when we got there, Grant had already cleared out. His landlord said he’d paid off everything he owed, left some vague note, and had some guys come pick up all his stuff.”

  Hayden sat up as he considered. “I guess that tracks, but then where has he been since we got here?”

  Collin shrugged. “I’m less worried about the Meathead than I am Paige.”

  He nodded to the one empty cell that remained. “I’m starting to get the feeling that the number of cells in here isn’t an accident.”

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  “When I got up yesterday, my biggest worry was finishing a comic book on time,” Hayden said.

  Collin took another look around their prison. “Yeah, I’ve come to terms with the fact that we’re going to miss our deadline.”

  Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THRUM. THRUM. THRUM.

  Jonathan knew he was losing his mind. At first, he’d pushed the fear away with sheer denial. Little by little, he reached a moment where even the effort to keep lying to himself was a waste of the faculties he had left. In fact, it was the same moment that he’d slumped to the floor.

  Tears had run down his cheeks and dried. How many hours had passed? That sort of question had lost any meaning.

  He hadn’t moved, was nearly lifeless aside from the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed—the occasional blink to lubricate his eyes. To anyone watching, he looked like a man staring at the white walls of his prison as though they had lulled him into a waking dream.

  There was light. It came from the other side of those white plastic boundaries. Occasionally, he saw the shadowed outline of a guard just before the slot in the door would open and food was pushed inside. The contents of what he was given never changed: a white tray, a white paper plate, crustless white bread, a white cup of milk, and a white bowl of unseasoned rice.

  There was a bed, though it was more like a wide shelf protruding from the back wall. Like everything else it was made of smooth white plastic. On top rested a thin white mat and a blanket so thick and heavy it could easily be mistaken for a rug. Apparently, The Cell didn’t wish to provide him with the means to strangle himself with his own bedding.

  There were other necessities, toilet and sink—all the same.

  When they had arrived, the guards had taken his cloth
es and exchanged them for a white shirt and pants. The lights overhead were bright, but not the warm yellow of a fluorescent bulb. Like everything else, it was a cold clinical white filtering in through the ceiling panels.

  When he’d first been placed inside, things had looked quite different. The blindfold had come off and the walls had been transparent. He’d been able to see Collin and Hayden as they were locked into similar cells on each side of his own.

  He’d still been able to hear them then. The Cell wasn’t allowing them to speak, but there had been the ambient noise of their movements, the clink of metal as guards removed their restraints and barked commands that they strip off their clothes.

  Jonathan hadn’t seen what caused his cell to change. Perhaps the guards had flipped a switch or swiped a keycard. Maybe someone on the outside of this egg was responsible. He didn’t know, but he had heard a current. Electricity ran through the plastic walls. A moment later, everything around him became white and unnaturally silent.

  He had known, within seconds of this, what was happening—it came to him as he touched that thick rug-like blanket.

  He remembered pulling a similar white blanket around his body for warmth in a similar room. He had been in his early twenties. He’d sat for days in white clothes, eating nothing but white and clear foods from white plates and cups. He remembered how the lights never turned off or flickered. How the door had been so seamlessly built into the wall, its hinges hidden, that often when he awoke from sleep he had been uncertain where the door was—or if it had ever actually existed at all.

  White Room Torture—he’d known the name of what was being done to him just as he knew this was the opening move in a game. His captors likely didn’t expect him to realize that they were taking their first step toward his mental undoing. The Cell had no way of knowing Jonathan had recently inherited a certain familiarity with such things from his father.

  In the early eighties, Douglas Tibbs had been trained to spot, understand, and endure enhanced interrogation methodologies. Though, at the time they just called it torture.

  Jonathan hadn’t even been born yet when he was being trained.

  Jonathan hadn’t been born yet. He’d remembered how strange that thought had been. I . . . I hadn’t been born yet.

  The theory behind the white room suggested that after long enough isolation in this sensory deprivation, victims began to lose any sense of identity. This was a rather oversized pill of irony for Jonathan to swallow at that moment. A tragedy, how lost it would be on his captors, who had no idea how silly the notion was that he might require assistance manifesting an identity crisis. To say that the proverbial ship had already sailed, didn’t really give the situation its due.

  Under any other circumstances this might have brought a short-lived smile, but what The Cell didn’t know about the world’s precarious state of affairs was going to hurt a lot more than the loss of Jonathan’s sanity. That his captors had chosen this strategy was bad. White Room Torture meant they were willing to play an exceptionally long game to coerce his cooperation. It was the sort of thing one did when they believed they had all the time in the world to extract information.

  There was no way for them to know how wrong they were.

  As such, Jonathan found himself in the sort of strange predicament one never imagines. One where he’d have preferred his captors had opted for good old conventional physical torture. At least then he could have tried to warn them of what was coming.

  Thing was, he was betting this wasn’t chance. The Cell had likely tried conventional tactics on other men who had been in contact with the alien. While Heyer had never told him this, it seemed doubtful that Jonathan was the first man they had ever brought in for interrogation.

  Then again, maybe he was. In the past, Heyer had always been able to intervene.

  Whatever the case may be, if their interrogators had managed to get one like himself into custody, then they must have tried the cruel and unusual: waterboarding, drug therapy, or plain old beatings. Having endured the things a man with an implant endured, Jonathan couldn’t imagine that anything short of permanent mutilation would have cracked them.

  The Cell would have to understand the man’s priorities.

  Fear, bruises, broken bones would never be enough, but taking out a kneecap or cutting off a limb would change the story. It was a simple equation really—one needed all their limbs to fight Ferox. Those with implants who survived long enough knew they would enter The Never in perfect condition—but that the alien device had its limits. He’d learned early on that simple wounds healed when the implant first activated—after all when an implant was put in a new host, it found itself in an open wound. Still, he severely doubted a missing leg would regrow itself.

  While Jonathan had a good idea how far The Cell was willing to take things, the fact that he wasn’t currently strapped to a table with a bone saw hovering over him was a fair indication that they hadn’t figured this out. Any other day, this would have been reason for relief, but the window of time before mankind had to prepare for war had shrunk considerably after Malkier tried to kill him. Suffice to say, the fact that he hadn’t been asked a single question yet didn’t bode well.

  These had been the thoughts at the forefront of his mind when he’d first arrived. They had only sustained his attention until the force of his will could no longer hold them at the surface. Jonathan’s most immediate concern wasn’t the looming apocalypse, nor was it his identity crisis. Even his isolation in the white room was a somewhat laughable problem.

  No. Jonathan’s current problem was that Malkier may have already killed him. Heyer’s brother hadn’t had to break Jonathan’s body with his massive Feroxian fists. All he’d had to do was sever the bond to Rylee.

  He’d still had some fight in him when he’d first arrived. He knew the opportunities would present themselves. That Mr. Clean knew where they had been taken and would engage contingency protocols to extract them. People would come to free him and Heyer. They would save him and his friends. Help was coming—Jonathan only had to keep his head.

  Unfortunately, he soon came to realize that this wasn’t up to him. That a broken bond was a dictator that gained power until it controlled everything. In the first few hours he thought he could hold it at bay, but it never stopped getting stronger. Its hold on him tightened with every passing minute. Soon, he realized that no amount of willpower could keep his mind’s focus where he wanted it.

  He began to feel pain that, while familiar, was more consuming than he’d ever known. Soon, trying to prepare for the future wasn’t about living up to his responsibilities. Rather, fighting to concentrate on how to salvage this situation became an attempt to find mercy from his own mind. A distraction—a place to flee the pain.

  He wracked his brain for what Heyer had said of the severed bond. The symptoms. The unnatural manipulation of his biochemistry. The problem was that knowing the cause still didn’t provide him any weapons to fight it. There was no consciousness to try reasoning with, the implant was doing this to him because it was mindlessly following its programming.

  On some level, Jonathan knew he’d chosen this. He’d done so under duress, but he’d still read the fine print and signed the contract. His intuition had warned him, kept him at odds with accepting the bond for days until it became the only door left for him.

  He’d let himself love Rylee.

  When his last truly lucid moment had come and gone, the bond had taught him that Hell was so much less complicated than any philosopher or poet had ever described.

  It was quite simple really. Hell was being unable to look away.

  His mind, his memories, they were an inescapable maze playing inside his head. Some real, and some conjured—his own imagination being used against him.

  One moment, he saw Rylee looking at him, trust in her eyes. “I think Heyer knows what he is doing. Chose you because he knows you’d protect us. Not just from his brother or these monsters, but maybe even from him.�
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  He blinked, and he felt her warmth against him as he held her in the darkness. “I wanted a lot of things. But yes . . . being a mother was one of them.”

  Suddenly, he saw himself in that alley. One of so many moments where he could have chosen another fate for her. He could have chosen not to let her die. He saw his indecision leave him pathetic, unable to move—letting time make the decision for him.

  Yet, the worst of it was knowing that, had he had all the time in the world to think, he wouldn’t have changed that choice. Not because he couldn’t, but because ever since he met Heyer, the types of decisions he got to make were never between good and evil—just bad or worse.

  For the thousandth time he saw himself standing in front of her when he came back from The Never, knowing what would happen. He heard himself speaking the words that would manipulate her into the sacrifice she would make. In the end, she’d believe he wouldn’t remember what had happened to her inside The Never.

  Eventually, he was a passenger in a mind that couldn’t be steered. His consciousness nothing more than an effort to make sense of an emotional grief too powerful to be natural. The difference between physical and emotional pain bleeding together until the distinction was lost. True agony, he learned, knew no difference.

  When they first met, Rylee had been suicidal for a time.

  Her bond had not been severed at the time. Heyer had said it had been incomplete. Now, he understood—he knew. Because there was nothing more terrifying than the reality that this condition was his life now.

  It could torture him—but could it kill him? Right now, it didn’t have an ending…

  . . . and he couldn’t look away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OCT 14, 2005 | 10 AM | WASHINGTON STATE

  LEAH SAT AT a table holding an ice pack over her eye. Her cheek had stopped throbbing but felt twice its normal size after colliding with Rylee’s fist earlier that morning.

  She was deep underground, in one of the drab windowless rooms beneath the hangar. The lights were off, but she wasn’t sitting in the dark. The glow of a flat screen monitor that took up most of the wall across from her blanketed the space as she watched multiple camera feeds. At that moment there were six in all, each displaying footage recorded half an hour earlier from containment shell two, where Jonathan and his friends would be kept for the foreseeable future.