Domination of the SPOOKS

by Chad V. Holtkamp

  “Someone’s waking up,” said a voice in the darkness. Dom didn’t recognize it, but it wasn’t like he could see anything. He was awake, but something covered his head. He was still groggy, and his head was spinning, though probably from the lack of caffeine.

  He hadn’t had drank the coffee Weisman poured him, except for one sip. “Damn!” he thought. “Weisman must be in on this. He spiked my coffee!”

  Dom couldn’t believe it, but it made sense with his descent into limbo land and waking up with a splitting headache.

  “Can I get some water? Or a grande mochaccino with three shots of espresso, heavy whip and cinnamon? Whichever is easiest?”

  “I’ll get you some water,” said the voice. So it’s a dude, Dom thought, but he still didn’t recognize the voice. He guessed that it was the strange man in black that everyone had said they’d seen lurking around campus, the same man in black they said was looking for him.

  “Well, I guess that’s a start,” Dom said. “So I guess you found me. Care to clue me in on what’s going on?”

  He could hear the man running water in the sink. “OK, so I’m in some house somewhere with running water,” he thought. He couldn’t smell anything unusual. “No fresh baked bread or apple pies. So I’m guessing I’m in a hotel suite?” It smelled stale like a room that hadn’t had the windows or door opened in a very long time. So he must have gotten in and out quickly and not stopped to feed the meters, piling up parking tickets out the wazoo.

  Dom impressed himself with his powers of observation. He’d heard that if you take any one sense, your others are heightened. Since he couldn't see maybe his sense of smell and hearing would be better than before?

  He heard a dog bark outside. Maybe it was a wolf? No, it was definitely a dog. A big dog. Malamute big, but not a Great Dane, English wolfhound, or Shetland sheepdog big. Yeah, St. Bernard big, the ones with the whiskey barrel under their necks that help rescue stranded skiers in avalanches. He was a thousand miles from the nearest mountain so that probably wasn’t the case.

  “Where am I?” Dom asked. It seemed like a simple question, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere.

  The man held a glass to his mouth and told him to drink through the cloth. The least he could have done was slide the mask up a bit more off his mouth. But that would let a glint of light in, and that couldn’t happen.

  Dom sipped the water through the cloth. It was poly-cotton, about 14 ounces, relatively heavy for such cheap fabric. “This guy definitely shopped on the softer side of Sears rather than getting anything luxurious from Zegna,” he thought.

  He wobbled back and forth in the chair. It creaked. “Yep, I’m definitely in a cheap motel,” he thought.

  The air conditioner kicked in, and Dom jumped. It was as loud as a jet engine, located over and behind his left shoulder. More than likely his back was to the window. Good choice since he wouldn’t be able to look out the window. That gave this guy the drop on seeing outside and watching the door from where he was.

  He guessed the guy was on the bed. Dom held his leg out in front, stretching his foot as best he could. There wasn’t anything there, but he sensed he was in a larger room. He had a sink so a suite would do it, but how many motels have suites? Suites are for hotels. This didn’t seem like a hotel. He couldn’t hear anything that sounded like a hallway in a hotel, though he could hear outside sounds through the door. There was definitely something outside in the open on the other side of the door.

  The man didn’t say anything. He let Dom sit and ponder, trying to figure out his surroundings.

  “OK, so I’m in the parlor with a candlestick and you're the butler going to kill me.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Mr. Wagner,” the man said.

  “So formal. My name’s Dom.”

  “I know that Mr. Wagner. I know everything about you.”

  “Still too formal,” Dom said. “You sound like my first-grade teacher when she was getting ready to kick our butts for being rowdy at recess.”

  That didn’t seem to get Dom anywhere, so he let it go. His stomach growled, echoing throughout the room.

  “Sorry about that,” Dom said. “You kidnapped me before breakfast, so I’m kind of hungry. But am I lunchtime hungry or dinnertime hungry? You tell me.”

  “It’s dinnertime, but we’ll get to that later. Sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Wagner, but I’m waiting for one of my associates to arrive. We’ll have dinner after that.”

  “Great, something to look forward to while I sit and ponder under the weight of this black mask.”

  Dom didn’t know what else to say, so he began to whistle. He started with a tune his grandfather taught him years ago. He never bothered to ask what it was, but his grandfather did it quite a bit while they were driving around aimlessly when he was a kid. It fit the current mood of wasting time waiting for someone else to show up.

  “You can stop now, Mr. Wagner,” the man said. “There’s no need for that. I can turn on the radio if you’d like some background noise.” Suddenly the room was filled with static, weird AM radio tuning static. If Dom listened carefully, he could almost make out alien languages.

  “Aww, that’s my favorite station!” he said. “The Aliens taught me that one when they picked me up a few years ago in the middle of the night.”

  The man didn’t laugh. Dom thought he was funny bringing up the Aliens. It had been quite the topic of discussion around the dinner table one night year’s back. A silent and mysterious beam had hovered over the Bean in downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue. The authorities chalked it up to being the coolest lightning display they’d ever seen.

  12

  The ship was late. The man in black was not amused. He hated when things ran off schedule. If the ship was supposed to be there at 6:00 PM, it damn well better be there at 6:00 PM. This wasn’t an el station; it was more like a fine railroad line or atomic clock that you could set your life to, not to mention humanity.

  At 6:02, the ship finally arrived, hovering silently in the night sky, the hull shimmering into view before settling down at the edge of the parking lot.

  The sun had set hours ago, and the dim moonlight shining down on the thickly wooded area was enough to conceal the matte black craft.

  From a distance, it looked like a giant Transit van and nothing more. The exotic electronics inside were safely hidden from view.

  A staircase descended from the far side, and the man in black’s supervisor stepped off into the parking lot. The supervisor turned to press a button on the outside and the steps folded away into the ship, settling out of view.

  She walked over to the motel room door, glancing from side to side before knocking lightly. The man in black had the door open even before she finished. She stepped inside, and the door closed automatically. Dom was sitting in the chair in the center of the room, the black cloth hood still covering his face.

  She turned to face him and whipped off the hood. Before he could say a word, she put a well-manicured red nail to his lips and told him to be quiet.

  “Now, Mr. Wagner, I understand you’re quite the popular fellow,” she said. “We’ve been watching you for some time, hoping you would turn out to be all that our records show you would eventually become.”

  Dom tried to speak, but he couldn’t open his lips. He was glad he didn’t have a stuffed up nose, or he’d be in trouble. He tried to wiggle his mouth, but all he could do was purse his lips. It wasn’t a flattering look.

  She pulled up chair backward across from his and leaned in close, so close he could smell a faint whiff of the freesia and citrus facial lotion she used that morning.

  “Are you ready to begin the next phase of your journey, Mr. Wagner?” she asked.

  He couldn’t speak, so he furrowed his eyebrows in thought. “There is a hot woman in black leather sitting in front of me. Who am I to say no?” he thought. He nodded in the affirmative.

  “This is a secret program, and the department we’re choosing you for is hi
gh-level ops. Think of the CIA on another level. We offer the best of the best, and it’s a special intergalactic challenge to find people capable enough to do what’s needed to be done.”

  “You’ll be escorting Ambassador Harley of the Federated Union to a council on planetary affairs.”

  Dom was confused. The name sounded familiar like he’d heard it on the news lately. He remembered thinking she was pretty young for an ambassador and pretty cute. That’s why he remembered her.

  “You came all this way to hire me as an escort?” Dom asked, surprised that he could speak again. “You couldn’t just have used Tinder?”

  After watching him for some time, she was well aware of his smartalec tendencies. She brushed her hair back off her face and smiled. The man in black grew antsy.

  Dom waited for her to say something, anything. When she didn’t reply, he took it as a yes, though it still seemed like a kinky mission that anyone with a pulse could do.

  “OK, so I escort this woman to the meeting, then what?”

  “You’ll provide her with the utmost security at all times,” the man in black said.

  “You’re still confusing me with Tinder,” Dom said. “There’s gotta be more to it than that.”

  “There is more,” she replied, “but until you’ve accepted this commission we’re not at liberty to give you that information.”

  “So what do I have to do?”

  “We can leave right away tonight, but you won’t be coming back here for quite a while.”

  “So I just leave the Academy and never come back? What about my stuff?”

  “We’ll send a team in a few days to collect your belongings,” the man in black said. “We updated Commander Weisman earlier this afternoon, and he approved.”

  The woman continued, “If you’re ready to accept, we have the paperwork written up and ready to go.”

  She turned to retrieve the clipboard the man in black had ready for Dom. She pulled out a special silver fountain pen from inside her long leather duster. Before she could hand it to him, she realized that his hands were still bound behind him.

  She pulled out a switchblade from her other pocket and flicked it open, slicing through the zip tie in one motion. Dom’s hands were free.

  In his mind, he wanted to pull her close and strangle her for making him sit in that damn chair all day with a hood over his face, a gnawing hunger growing inside his belly. Then he looked closer and realized how hot she was, her pale skin and the wavy black hair dancing gingerly her bare shoulders. “Hmmm…that might not be such a good idea,” he thought.

  Instead, he held his hands close and rubbed his wrists where the zip tie left marks on his skin.

  She handed him the clipboard and removed the cap from the pen.

  13

  Dom took the pen and the clipboard from the gorgeous leather-clad woman and read over what she wanted him to sign. It was filled with line after line of legalese, mostly boilerplate, but apparently, it was an employment contract from the bit he could understand. That was something about the law that he never understood, why they had to make everything so damn complicated. He guessed it had to do with covering everyone’s butts and continuing to get retained and paid since no one but another lawyer could understand the documents.

  Getting through the whatnots and wherein and herebys, he got to the important part.

  “You, the undersigned, hereby subjugate your person to the property of the United States Special Practice Origins Operations Klan.

  “Oh, my God,” he thought. “She’s drafting me to be a SPOOK!”

  He couldn’t believe what he was reading. He’d heard rumors about SPOOKS for years, but no one ever came out and verified anything about them. They were a covert upon covert black ops program with no rightful recall authority by anyone. The President of the USA didn’t even have knowledge of them.

  And here was his chance, threat, opportunity to leave the Academy early and devote his life to the darkest of the dark arts and the deepest well of conspiracy theorists the world had ever known.

  No wonder the guy was wearing black. But why was this chick wearing leather? He didn’t mind, she looked pretty hot in it, especially when she bent over with her hands on his knees and moved in close. He held her gaze after reading the form, and she stared back at him.

  He tried to keep his eyes on hers but her deep cleavage staring him in the face was more than he could resist. He cracked. His eyes left hers, and he looked down. He stole a peek at her cleavage.

  It was impressive. Not that he’d never been around spectacular cleavage before, but after the day he’d had with the hunger and the pain in his head from the lack of caffeine mixed with the knowledge that SPOOKs, sort of blew his mind. “What's next?” he thought. “That Aliens are real?

  He knew he shouldn’t have looked at the voluptuous bosom in front of him, but he couldn't help himself. It was a Pavlovian response to a beautiful woman. She followed his gaze, knowing full well what he was looking at. She stepped back and stood up straight to adjust the lapels of her duster. She stretched her neck and looked him back in the eye.

  “There’s much more than where that came from, Mr. Wagner,” she said. To Dom, it sounded more like a threat than a seductive come-hither turn on.

  “If you sign this paper, you can have all that you desire, courtesy of your Uncle Sam.”

  The man in black stood up, feigning outrage. He’d waited far too long for something like this to happen to himself. And now this kid was getting the royal treatment from his boss. It was unreal. He didn’t know what else to say, but Dom certainly did.

  “Sign me up!” Dom said.

  * * *

  Dom was ready for something new. He’d been preparing for this moment his entire life, and now it was staring him in the face in the form of a beautiful brunette in head to toe black leather. “I wonder if her underwear is leather, too?” he thought. “She’s probably not wearing underwear from the looks of things.”

  He’d excelled his entire life, hoping to make something bigger than himself out of it. He didn’t want to be one of those classic stories, someone who kicks butt in everything and then never makes good on his promise of success. Potential unfulfilled, the age-old story. Luck meant being prepared when the opportunity arose. And he was prepared.

  He was damn straight going to sign on that dotted line. The woman practically drooled with anticipation as he held the pen in his right hand and the clipboard in his left, flipping it back to the last page where his signature would go.

  “You’re still a notary, right?” she asked the man in black. “Guessing you don’t have your stamp, but that’s okay. We can take care of that later. As long as you’re here to witness it, we’ll be golden, or onyx as the case may be.”

  Dom was about to touch the fountain pen to the paper when he stopped. He looked up at the faces of two incredibly eager SPOOKs. Oh my God, he couldn't believe he was in the presence of two of them. “Why did they choose a rundown dumpy motel for this?” he thought. “Why couldn’t we have been downtown at the Ritz? Hell, even the Holiday Inn would have been better than this. LaQuinta would have been a major step up, and he could have slept like one.”

  “Before I sign this,” he asked, “I want to know if I’ll ever be able to see my family and friends again? I mean, is this like the witness protection program where no one ever hears from me again? You know what I mean, right? Hell, we’ve heard rumors for years about you, but no one ever came out and admitted it. No evidence had ever been found. But here you both are, right in front of my face.”

  “You will still be allowed contact with the outside world,” she said. “Though you will be given a special retinal implant that allows you to erase any memory of those interactions. You’ll need to do that with most people on a daily basis. Or we can give you a cloaking device that will erase your tracks for you.”

  “But what about my parents and sisters?” he asked. “Will I be dead to them?”

  “Yes, as soon
as you sign that paper, your body will die, and you’ll be buried in a grave by your family. You’ll never see them again and will only be allowed to haunt them in their dreams.”

  “Wow, really? That bites.”

  “Don’t be so gullible, Mr. Wagner,” she said. “Yes, you’ll get to see your family. You’ll have to tell them you’re on a special mission for a while, and you won’t be home and can only contact them via email. Will that be acceptable?”

  She really thought that showing off her cleavage would have worked with Dom. She didn’t usually pull out the big guns, but she thought he was cute. “That damn smile of his is going to get us into trouble,” she thought. Now she was worried that he was going to back out at the last minute. Then she’d have to get angry, and he wouldn’t like her when she was angry.

  Dom was thinking over his options. He could give up everything he knew — the friends he had at the Academy, the thought of Jessica waking up with him tomorrow morning, how pissed Jock would be that Dom had gotten drafted to the SPOOKs and he hadn’t.

  That finally threw him over the edge. He signed the paper and handed it back to her. She was giving off an air of desperation like she was about to do something awful.

  Part of him wished he hadn’t been so hasty to sign. He might have gotten a thrill out of seeing her on edge like that. But the thought of pissing off Jock Saunders in a whole, new mind-blowing way was too much to pass up. Jock was never going to be in his league, and this put the official stamp on that fact. He would forever be better than Jock. And Dom would forever be Jock’s nemesis.

  Did you like Domination of the SPOOKS?

  Before we wrap things up, I want to say “thank you” for making it all the way to end.