by John Bromley
More reports came in to the police station that night, at least two dozen, all depressingly similar. Women, most of whom had never committed a crime any more heinous than running a stop sign, were suddenly seized by, and acted on, a seemingly irresistible urge to kill men. Or so they said. Usually the victims were their husbands or boyfriends, sometimes sons, brothers or fathers; even, in the case of the ICU nurse, a complete stranger.
Sergeant Jansen was studying a map of the city, in which he had inserted push-pins to mark the sites of the incidents as they were reported. He saw that they were concentrated in this corner of the city, and centered, more or less, around the Hamilton house, site of the first attack. He also noted with dismay that the most recent calls were expanding the perimeter of the circle. Whatever it was, it was spreading.
And it did spread, and the calls kept coming in to stations all over the city. By the third day, the death toll had exceeded two hundred, and the story was beginning to make headlines nationally. The mayor was convinced that they were looking at some kind of epidemic, and sent for specialists from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
The CDC people listened to the women affected, most of whom told a story similar to the one Judy McMillen had told, of a “black cloud” that flashed through their minds, “taking control” and “forcing” them to act involuntarily, and didn’t release its hold until their victim was dead; then it seemed to vanish without a trace, as if it had never been there. The doctors had no idea what to make of that.
They took blood samples, although one man almost lost his life doing so. Even though the woman was restrained by heavy straps, when the doctor swabbed her arm to inject the needle, she broke out of her bonds and nearly strangled him. He was able to use his feet to push her away, and when she crashed into the wall, she slumped lifelessly to the floor.
After that, they sent in female doctors and nurses to collect blood, for in all this time not a single report had come in of one woman attacking another. And when they analyzed the blood samples, they found an unfamiliar virus in every one. They assumed they had found the agent responsible for the women’s bizarre behavior, for none of them had ever seen anything like it before, and it was not present in blood samples they had taken from men for comparison. But, again, they couldn’t say what it was or where it had come from.
More to the point, they didn’t know how to kill it. It was not affected by any antibiotics they had. They tried every kind of medical therapy they could think of. Even some truly outlandish ideas were listened to and attempted. Nothing worked. The virus seemed totally immune to anything they threw against it.
“That’s all for this lesson, class, and the end of the taping for our special guest student. Does anyone have any questions? Yes, Cynthia…”
With that, the video ended.
Both men sat in shocked silence for a long time, until Jim raised his hand.
“Yes, Angela, I have a question or two, or six… hundred.”
CHAPTER 10
Wellington awoke to someone shaking his shoulder. His head ached a little, but not badly. He opened his eyes gingerly, and saw that everything looked as it had before he had been put under. The light was still as bright as before, the other people were still where they had been earlier. The man rousing the passengers was new, though. He realized that the train, or whatever it was, was still not moving. More likely, he told himself, the ‘trip’ was completed while we were unconscious, so we wouldn’t know where they were taking us. Of course, with no windows in this… vehicle, we wouldn’t have known anyway, but I guess they’re taking no chances.
The doors had opened again, and the man who had revived the people was now directing them to exit. Wellington stood and went out the doors. He was deposited in another corridor, though nowhere near as confining as the one he had been forced through when he entered the train. This led into another room, where names were checked against another list, and the people separated into smaller groups for… whatever came next. Wellington was assigned to a group with two other people, and instructed to sit in what, this time, was undoubtedly a waiting room.
Eventually, his name was called, and he was taken into another room. It appeared to be an examining room, so he expected that the next person he saw would be a doctor, and he was not disappointed.
The doctor entered, looking down at the patient chart on a clipboard.
“Mister... Wellington, I see here. You are Gerald Wadd—”
“I usually go by ‘G. Waddington’,” he said, thinking the physician had stopped in mid-word due to uncertainty of the name’s pronunciation.
The doctor looked up at him, hands almost shaking. “You are a ‘Waddington’?”
“No, actually, ‘Wellington’ is the family name…” he began, but it was clear that the explanation was being ignored. After another look at the clipboard, the doctor opened the door and called to a colleague.
“Take over for me here. I just… I can’t do… this… to him.”
“I understand,” the new physician said, watching the first doctor walk down the hall. “I’ll take care of it for you, Dr. Waddington.”
“That doctor’s name is ‘Waddington’?” Wellington asked when the door was closed again. “The same as my middle name?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Who knows? We might be related,” Wellington laughed.
“That is actually quite likely,” the doctor replied in all seriousness.
“Well… be that as it may,” Wellington blustered, “let’s get to it, shall we? Do whatever it is you’re going to do, and let me out of here. I’m an important man, and need to get back to business.”
This actually made the doctor laugh. “The only thing you have to do is what we tell you. Over the next several days—”
“Days?”
“You heard right, sir. In the days ahead, you will provide us with several samples.”
“Of what?” Wellington asked fearfully. “Blood? Urine? Brain matter?”
“Semen.”
“What?”
“We’ll show you, Mr. Wellington.” The doctor held up a vial. “Now… take off your pants, please.”
Taking this sample proved to be not only painless, but actually enjoyable, and left Wellington feeling quite refreshed and strangely energized. He actually looked forward to the next day, when they would repeat this procedure. Indeed, a semen sample was taken from him each day, using a variety of very pleasurable techniques. Three different doctors took turns collecting these samples, but none of them was the Dr. Waddington he had seen that first day. By the seventh day, he was able to perform the procedure with almost no assistance from the medical staff, although it was even more fun when they “helped.”
He noticed that samples taken from him were labeled and treated very carefully, then taken and stored in a special section of the refrigeration unit. He assumed this to be the case for all the subjects, until he happened to see a doctor take several samples from other men, and dump them all into one large collection vessel.
After the seventh session, and while Wellington was dressing, the doctor said, “I hope you have enjoyed your stay with us, and we certainly are going to miss you, Mr. Wellington—”
“Wait a minute,” he said with his pants only halfway up his legs, “What do you mean, you’re going to ‘miss me’? Where am I going?”
“We have all the samples we need from you now,” the doctor continued somewhat sadly, “and… you are ‘Section Fifteen’, right?”
“Somebody out there thinks so,” he responded bitterly.
“That means, unfortunately, it’s time for you to face Part Two of the program.”
“And, how many parts are there to this ‘program’?”
“Two.”
He was almost afraid to ask, but he had to.
“And then… I can leave?”
The physician’s answer, just before leaving the room, was, “Don’t be silly, Mr. Wellington. Nobody ever leaves this place.”
Sadly, in Mr. Wellington’s case, as in so many others, the doctor was proven right.
CHAPTER 11
“Well, we know one thing for sure.”
The sudden sound, after so many minutes of silence, startled Mike.
“We do? What might that be, Jim?”
“You remember on the video, the one police officer who… well, bashed the guy’s head into the doorjamb?”
“I doubt I’ll ever forget that image, as long as I live,” Mike shuddered.
“According to Angela’s story, at the time this was taking place, women were doing all the attacking. It mentioned ‘the Hamilton woman… the Smith woman’. That means that the person we saw, Officer Judy what’s-his-name, was… a woman. We’ve seen an actual woman.”
“That could be—even if it was seven hundred years ago,” Mike allowed cautiously. “And if that’s so, we may be the only two men alive who can say that. So, did you notice anything unusual about… what’s the term? ‘Her’?”
“Not ‘strange,’ like men-from-outer-space strange; just… different. Judy was shorter than the men around… her—guess I better get used to that word. Lighter in weight. Longer hair, but that may have been the style back then.”
“He—I mean, she—also seemed a little… I don’t know… rounder?—than the men.”
“Yeah, that sums it up nicely,” Jim agreed. “Different body mass distribution than a man. Rounder. Curvier.”
At this point, the men noticed what time it was getting to be and decided that they had “delayed their departure” long enough. Packing their gear into the car, including the now-useless memory stick, they left town. Lacking preemptive coordinates from their unknown geo-caching companion, which seemed almost strange by this time, they pointed the car toward their assigned destination.
“All I know,” Mike said with a conviction which surprised even him, “is that it was fascinating just watching her move. Very pleasant; almost hypnotic—up until… you know.”
“And, did you notice the other thing?” Jim asked. “Her voice—much higher pitched than the men in the station. In fact, very much like… Angela’s voice.”
“Not to mention the other voices in this ‘class’ we’ve been auditing,” Mike added.
“You know what I think, Mike? We’ve been watching a woman, teaching a class of women about their history.”
After several minutes of pondering, Jim continued.
“Assuming I’m right, that still leaves several major questions. First: if this ‘history’ is real, why don’t we—men in general—know anything about it?
“Second: Where are these women?”
“And, of more immediate concern,” Mike chimed in, “where are these videos coming from?”
“I have a feeling that the answers to the last two questions are connected.”
“The major problem of the moment, Jim,” the ever-pragmatic Mike declaimed, “is that we have no solid evidence. All we had were two videos, which went up in smoke after we watched them. We have no proof of anything, not even the existence of these women.”
“We saw them on the video—”
“No we didn’t. All we saw was a woman—one—and even the story said she lived about seven hundred years ago. This ‘Angela’ person has conveniently stayed out of the picture, along with the entire so-called ‘class.’ We assume it’s a woman, but there’s no proof.”
“So far, anyway,” Jim added quickly.
As they continued to drive, Jim continued to think. Mike wanted evidence—how could they get it? Where could they find it?
“One thing we can’t do is ask anyone about ‘women’,” he said at length.
“That’s for sure,” Mike agreed. “No one would know what we’re talking about.”
“There’s more to it than that. From the first video, we learned what a ‘mother’ is. We compared the Treated and un-Treated Bible pages and saw what Treatment did to the ‘Honor thy Father and thy Mother’ commandment. It removed the last three words. But you have to wonder—why them specifically? Why not the whole thing? That would have been just as easy.”
“The second video showed a viral infection in the Phoenix area which caused women to go crazy and kill men,” Mike offered.
“Granted, that was a bad thing,” Jim allowed, “but they would have had to deal with it somehow because, according to the first video, women are absolutely essential to the continuation of the human race. So, if you take all that we’ve been told as gospel, and since the human species has obviously continued, then it follows that we all have mothers—what was that for?” he asked when he saw his partner cringe.
“I’m sorry, Jim, but that idea… to think that I’m as old as I am and have a ‘parent’ I’ve never met. It gives me the creeps. It makes me feel… I don’t know.”
“Inadequate? Unfulfilled? Like there’s a ‘duty’ you haven’t performed, but should have?”
“Yeah… I guess that’s about it.”
“So, we have ‘mothers’, but for some reason, knowing about them or making reference to them—”
“—is a death sentence,” Mike finished the thought.
But why? Jim’s mind persisted.
They were traveling beside a lake. Noting that there was no other traffic in the area, Jim instructed Mike to pull into a rest area beside the water. “Time to dispose of this memory stick… and I have an idea.”
After throwing the stick as far from shore as he possibly could, Jim got back into the car and reached for his cell phone. While dialing, he explained, “we can’t ask about women, but there are other aspects of that history we can check out.”
“Alleged ‘history’,” Mike insisted.
“Good afternoon, General Chambers,” Jim spoke into the phone. After exchanging pleasantries and assuring the general that they were indeed close to their assigned objective, he asked, “do we have anyone who’s not busy in the, uh, Phoenix area that I might… borrow for a short assignment?” Keep it as casual as possible, he told himself.
“Well… I’ll have to check,” the general replied. Jim could hear the shuffling of papers as Chambers inquired, “What kind of assignment?”
“Just a little… research I’d like to have done.”
“You’re in Ontario, looking for… I mean, heading for war games,” Chambers said, catching himself in mid-sentence. “What does Phoenix have to do with anything up there?”
“Well, you see, sir,” Jim said, making it up as he went along, “we’re sitting at some greasy spoon this morning, and a guy a couple seats down mentioned ‘military’ something to his buddy. So, of course, my ears perked up, and I’m trying to listen to what he’s saying without being too obvious, but I could only hear about every other word. Heard something about ‘military convoy… accident in Phoenix… couple hundred years ago… old folk-tales.’ Strange stuff. And that’s why I’m wondering—you wouldn’t think something happening in Arizona would factor into a folk tale up here. Anyway, I thought if someone in Phoenix had time to check around and see if there was some kind of accident a long time ago, maybe I could make a little more sense of all this.”
“I doubt anyone can make any sense out of that,” Chambers noted, to which Jim quickly agreed, “but as it happens, I found someone down in the Phoenix area that’s not too busy at the moment. I’ll have Charlie Jansen look into this for you. You know him, don’t you, Colonel?”
Jim did know the lieutenant slightly. He was a decent soldier, but nothing special.
As Jim hung up, he and Mike had a simultaneous realization.
Jansen. The same name as the police sergeant in the video they had watched that morning. I wonder if they’re related, Jim couldn’t help thinking.
A few hours later, Charlie Jansen parked his car and emerged into the Phoenix heat. His orders from General Chambers had been somewhat cryptic, but he promised to do his best. “Please the brass at all costs” was his personal motto.
With nothing to go on except wha
t the general had relayed to him from Parker, he decided there were two places he could try—the library (a long shot, admittedly), or City Hall (a slightly-shorter shot). It was his choice of the latter that found him downtown wearing civilian clothes. He reasoned that if his errand proved fruitless, he didn’t want the military to appear ignorant. He entered the City Hall building and asked the man behind the information desk where he might find anything pertaining to “several hundred years ago.” When asked for specifics, he mentioned a “rumor” of an accident involving a military convoy.
Almost immediately a second man, dressed in casual business attire, appeared beside him. “Sorry to interrupt, but I think you’ll want the ‘Archives’ division. I work for the City and I was just heading that way myself. Let me show you.”
Exchanging nods with the clerk, as co-workers often do, the stranger led Jansen to an elevator in the back for the trip downstairs to Archives.
“Reassigned?” Jim shouted into his phone. “What are you talking about, General? How could Jansen be reassigned when he was maybe four hours into an assignment for me? Since when does that happen?”
“I admit it’s unusual, Colonel, but I’m only telling you what I know. I have his reassignment orders right here, Parker. They were issued by one of the members of the General Staff.”
“Are you absolutely sure of that, General?” Parker asked pointedly.
“Yes, I am. They are printed on letterhead that is only available to these men.”
But could easily be counterfeited, Jim’s rational side asserted.
“Do you know which man specifically, sir?” he asked.
“No, actually I don’t.”
