STASIS: Part 3: Restart

by E. W. Osborne

  She pushed herself up and frowned at him, wondering where this was going. “Really? You can’t stand going anywhere there isn’t delivery and now you want to go off grid?”

  He shrugged and rubbed the scruff of his week-old stubble as he came close. “I’m getting better working upstate. It’s not so bad and at least up there, you can put some distance been yourself and your neighbor.”

  “I guess… but doesn’t that leave you kind of exposed and vulnerable?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve never had other people to worry about like you two.” He rested his hand on her stomach, shadowed eyes serious. “I’d do anything to keep you safe.”

  Two hours later, she was in a car zooming out of the city. The guilt of lying to Christopher was minor. In the deepest part of her soul, she knew she was doing the right thing. The greater good was always going to be more important than her personal life.

  As she traveled the bridge across the river, she tried to remember the last time she’d actually left the city limits and came up short. It felt good to be out, moving, striving toward something.

  The video was the first step. Hypnos and I managed to save countless people from a horrible fate. If this group of kids can point me in the direction of who is responsible…

  She shook her head at the thought. The scale of that kind of news story was too much for her to understand. That would be career-changing, life-changing. But she had to chase every lead, no matter how small. That drive is what got her to Dr. Lal, what put her at the hospital in the first place. Not knowing what was around the next corner used to be exhilarating, but at the moment, it also felt exhausting.

  She set an alarm on her cuff to go off twenty minutes before she reached the address Hypnos had shared. Curling up on the seat, she yawned and smiled. Alex, she reminded herself, saying a silent prayer that he was still okay.

  The quiet neighborhood was a far cry from the bustling, bristling city she’d just left. The car pulled up to a gorgeous detached house, the lights on and welcoming. The lawns were green and watered despite recent drought concerns. The hum of lawnmowers and the night’s first crickets sounded almost fake. Their lives were so vastly different from hers, she felt like she’d landed on foreign planet. Kristine turned in a full circle, wondering if she’d slipped inside a strange Dreamscape. The door to the house popped open and out slipped a slight girl with wild curly hair. She padded down the concrete in bare feet.

  “Kristine McKay,” she said with a touch of awe.

  “You must be Mouse,” she replied, extending her hand. A small group formed in the lit doorway beyond.

  “Maggie.” She glanced over her shoulder at the crowd behind. “They won’t bite, don’t worry.”

  The girl was friendly and disarming, calming the strange nerves she was surprised had bubbled up. “I just wasn’t expecting so many people.”

  “We have a lot to tell you.”

  After the introductions, they all gathered in the living room. Fresh glasses of water and beer sweated on the tables.

  Kristine perched on a footstool while the others circled around, almost as though she were a teacher in a classroom. She leaned forward, a subconscious posture she’d adopted to hide her baby bump.

  “So, your parents aren’t home?”

  “They uh, they went up to Canada to check on my grandmother. She’s alone and not really handling all this stuff too well,” Neil replied. He rubbed the back of his neck nervously, eyes shifting from friend to friend as if searching for validation.

  “And all of you live nearby?” she asked the others.

  Ian, a confident and charming man with sun-bleached hair, smiled. “Close enough. We all wanted to be here to help.”

  Rachel, a meek girl with long hair nodded silently before touching Wills knee. Kristine didn’t get the sense the pair were a couple, but definitely close friends. He was the most reluctant, but still managed a weak smile.

  “However we can.”

  Kristine was a pretty good judge of character. While they didn’t all seem to fit together as friends, it was clear they were close. It didn’t take her long to realize this was simply a group of scared college kids in way over their heads. The more time she spent with them, the more she relaxed. Before she began her questioning, she even worried it might all be a waste of her time, that they were overreacting, but when she heard their stories, she knew she’d struck gold.

  Neil began by telling her about the Project Stasis website he’d found, how he’d drawn the connection to the murders. The friends took turns filling in the blanks, adding their little pieces of the story. Their lack of coherence reassured her further. The story felt raw, unfocused, as if this were the first time they’d all laid it out in a linear fashion.

  They started slowly at first, but as their threads tangled together, she had to slow them down.

  “Wait, hold on. You were all taken by those men?”

  “No, just me,” Neil replied.

  “But if you think this website is to blame, why not all of you? You all watched the countdowns, right?”

  They looked to one another and shrugged.

  “I think because we were the only ones trying to figure out what it meant, maybe,” Wills answered without looking up.

  “Okay. So these guys show up in your room and you all take off. Then what?”

  “We disabled our Seeds and went to hide in the forest for a little while,” Maggie continued. “We didn’t want to put our families at any risk, so we made it seem like we were blowing off steam from the semester.”

  Kristine nodded, scanning the room. “Brave.”

  The girl shrugged. “It was a split second decision.”

  “No, don’t do that. Don’t diminish your actions,” Kristine insisted. Their eyes snapped up to her. Even she wondered where this passion suddenly appeared from. As the pregnancy carried on, she was finding her emotional range swung in wider arcs. “You woke up every day and made that choice to keep your loved ones safe. That’s brave. We need more brave people in the world.”

  Although they were only a few years apart in age, Kristine felt so much more mature than this group. The dynamic shifted. They desperately needed someone to talk to, to trust. A motherly, protective warmth spread through her chest, flushing her cheeks. She was happy to play the role.

  She cleared her throat and pressed on. “Okay, you’re out camping. Alex told me you all got separated at one point. How did that happen?”

  Ian glanced to Maggie who refused to meet his gaze. Neil noticed the moment pass between the two and stepped in. With a clinical, almost unemotional tone, he filled her in with the details. From the disastrous hike to returning home, he spoke as if explaining the plot of a movie, not something that’d happened to him.

  Kristine jotted down a few notes on her tablet while he spoke, mostly questions that popped into her head she didn’t want to interrupt with.

  “So, this building—”

  “No. It was like, a compound. There were dozens of buildings,” Maggie corrected.

  “And two fences?”

  “Miles long,” Wills replied.

  “There weren’t any signs? Nothing that told you what it was?”

  They all shook their heads, looking like a bunch of guilty children. She didn’t think they were hiding anything from her, but sensed they were embarrassed they couldn’t help further.

  “Could it have been military?” she read from her tablet.

  Neil frowned, his eyebrows casting a shadow over his already hollow eyes. “I don’t think so. They didn’t have military uniforms or anything.”

  “What were they wearing?”

  “Black. All black.”

  “Like the men who took you?”

  His mouth fell open as he considered it. He looked to Wills with wide eyes. “I never thought that—”

  Kristine held her hands up, mentally kicking herself. She could’ve just screwed the credibility of this whole thing up. Interviewing like this was a diff
icult balancing act. She didn’t want to lead him into thinking anything false. At the same time, people are great at ignoring the most obvious of connections.

  “I’m not saying they’re the same. I was just asking if they were wearing similar clothes. But I get it. Black is black.”

  As the conversation continued, the more animated the others became. An avalanche of questions rushed at her, things they’d obviously been holding inside for a while.

  “Where do you think this is all coming from? Do you really believe Steele is behind it?” Ian asked, resting his chin on the tips of his steepled fingers.

  “I’m not really sure,” she answered carefully.

  “But if not them, then—”

  Wills jumped in, angry and aggressive. “What about the government? If this was an external threat, don’t you think we would’ve been bombing someone by now?”

  Maggie laughed once. “Who do you suggest they bomb? Ghosts? Dreams?”

  “I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying that’s what they’d do.”

  Rachel lifted her head, her long hair sliding from her face. “Are you saying you think the government is being controlled, too?”

  The group erupted, talking and shouting over one another. To their credit, Kristine hadn’t considered the idea that the lack of response was because of mind control. She took the cynical route, figuring no one in power cared until it started happening to them.

  Through the din, she heard Neil mumble beside her. He leaned forward, hands clasped, hand hung low.

  She touched his shoulder. “What was that?”

  “There’s…” he muttered, a little louder, but in the noise she couldn’t understand.

  “Neil, what did you—”

  “There’s something else!” he shouted. All conversation ceased, eyes focused on him. He looked at each of them in turn, obviously sharing new information with the group. “When I left Maggie in the closet, I got turned around. I ended up in this weird hallway of doors. When I heard someone coming again, I jumped inside one and found all these people.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” Maggie demanded, not allowing him to finish his thought.

  “They were in beds, like, hospital beds. They were the people from the videos, the catatonics. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, if all those doors had that many people behind them.”

  Kristine’s mind immediately jumped to Dr. Lal and the patients he’d shown her. Moving them upstate wouldn’t have been too difficult and maybe, that’s where he was being held too. Although it screamed danger, she knew there was no other choice. “Yeah, I’m gonna need to see this facility.”

  Kristine didn’t miss the expression that spread across Neil’s face before he looked to his feet, fear mixed with satisfaction. That was exactly what he wanted to hear.

  “You want to go in there?” Wills asked, horrified.

  “No, no,” she waved. “Just to see it. Poke around. You said it was big and they can’t patrol the whole fence, right?”

  Neil nodded. “We can take you up there tomorrow, if you want.”

  “Oh, now you’re all Mister Bravery,” Maggie scoffed. “It’s not all that far from here. My family used to go camping there all the time.”

  Her gut was telling her they needed to go right away, but she chalked it up to her nerves being away from home. There was no way Christopher would find out where she was as long as she messaged him and answered his calls.

  “Sure. What’s one day matter?” she shrugged.

  Chapter Ten

  South Lake Tahoe, CA

  July 14th

  Streams of white, swirling mist rose from the pine trees. Off in the distance, the shimmering water muted by fog. The birds happily chirped and danced in the trees above. A warm breeze teased a strand of hair loose from behind Penelope’s ear, which she tucked back into place with a sharp grunt.

  “I hate this. I hate everything about this,” she muttered to herself.

  “Most people would kill for a view like that,” a gruff voice said from behind.

  She didn’t jump, move, or otherwise react. Instead, she lifted her forearms from the rough wooden railing and slowly straightened. The sound of footsteps drawing closer were like nails on a chalkboard.

  “What I mean is—”

  “You still aren’t fluent in body language, are you Cam?”

  Air rushed from his nose as he came up to the railing at her side. “Is that something you really want me to answer?” She rolled her eyes but refused to look at him.

  Since coming up to the Conrad’s cabin, she’d found it difficult to directly look at anyone, especially her own reflection.

  Cameron rightly let the subject drop, but didn’t grant her the solitude she’d been seeking. They stood in silence watching the fog burn off, unspoken words rolling around on their tongues. Minutes passed. Penelope knew he was waiting for her to break first.

  “He needs to sleep.” Her voice was gravelly, like she’d been screaming or smoking too much.

  “Wesley says it’s actually easier on him if we keep him up. You know sleep deprivation can break down resistance.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s a torture method.” Angry tears pricked the corners of her eyes. She deliberately looked at him, wanting him to see. It was easy for the others. Joey was a stranger to them, just another patient.

  “We aren’t torturing him, Pen… Christ,” he breathed.

  “We’re not? Right, so,” she laughed incredulously. “He’s not actually in there, restrained and blindfolded? He’s not asking us, begging me, to let him go home to our daughter?”

  Cameron’s compassionate gaze came with a caveat. “Are you forgetting what you and Dr. Hermit in there did to me? Out of any one of us, I know what Joey is going through the best. He might be a little uncomfortable, but he’s not being tortured.”

  He gave her a look that implied he wasn’t saying more, that he knew what real torture was like. She bit her tongue, but still stood by her point. Instead of forcing it down his throat, she tried a different tactic.

  “Don’t the moral implications bother you? Don’t you feel, deep down, how wrong this all is?”

  “This isn’t a classroom. We’re in the field. Fully engaged. We don’t—”

  She scoffed, turning her back to the view and leaning against the railing with her arms crossed. “Don’t give me that military war-time bullshit. It won’t work on me.”

  “You don’t think we’re at war? Someone, some country or person or terrorist group essentially killed millions of Americans. Millions.” He shook his head in disgust. It was the first glimmer she’d seen of how deeply the recent events had gotten to him. “You’ve seen what we do when a few thousand die. We have no idea what the political fallout is going to be from this.”

  Penelope had to give him that much. She’d been so wrapped up in her own personal drama, it made it difficult to extract and see the bigger picture. The truth was terrifying.

  “It’s not like they’re gonna attack another country over this. I doubt it’s state-sanctioned,” she said, trying to ease her own fresh worries.

  “The fact is, we don’t know.” He held her with a steely gaze. “We have no idea what’s really going on out there. Hell, we don’t even know what’s going at the bottom of this mountain. That’s what we’re trying to do here, Pen. If we can figure out who and why and how, maybe we—”

  She railed against the injustice of it all. “Why is it up to us? Why? Surely other experts, my brother even, should be the ones figuring this out!”

  His response was soft. “They probably are, but that doesn’t mean we can stop. It’s not our job, but it’s our responsibility. We’re capable of fixing this, so we should.”

  Penelope turned away from the truth in his words. She hated that he knew the geography of all her buttons, and that they hadn’t changed much over the years.

  Cameron inched closer, bumping his shoulder against hers. “Plus, we have that crazy old guy in th
ere. You know he wouldn’t step foot in Steele Industries again, let alone a government facility.”

  “So, on top of saving the world from whatever the fuck this all is, we have to babysit him?” she snorted.

  “Pretty much.”

  She returned his feeble grin, showing he’d managed to break through a little. “We should probably get back in there,” she nodded toward the house. She continued in a whisper. “Honestly? I’m afraid to leave him alone with Joey. At least all the tests haven’t been invasive, yet… it’s a matter of time before he tries to crack his head open.”

  “Oh, you mean like he did with mine?” Cameron touched the back of his neck. The physical memory was healing, but the mental wound was raw and fresh.

  “I seem to remember you begged for it,” she replied. He grinned at her dark humor, pleased she’d joined him in the shadows.

  Penelope found the scientist and her husband where she’d left them. Wesley was hunched over the kitchen table, the acrid scent of solder in the air. She took a moment to really examine their surroundings, seeing them as if afresh.

  All the superfluous furniture had been moved and stacked against a far wall to make room for the workshop. Using every flat surface they could find, they’d constructed an island of sorts. Dressers, nightstands, tables, all congregated in the center of the open plan living space. Every counter in the kitchen was covered.

  All it needs are test tubes and Bunsen burners, and we’d have the full evil scientist lair, she thought.

  Joey squirmed in the chair in the corner. His wrists and ankles had been tightly taped, the blindfold and headphones still blocking his senses.

  Penelope had insisted on not restricting his mouth, a decision the others had argued against. Joey didn’t make her position any better. When he wasn’t quietly sobbing, he was begging to be released. When he wasn’t begging, he would sing obnoxiously loud in an effort to get some type of reaction from them. No matter how much she pleaded with him, she couldn’t get him to stop.

  That’s what hurt the most. He now saw her as the enemy… and she couldn’t blame him.