Chapter 30
When he woke up, it crashed down upon him like doomsday. After a moment of lying there, engulfed by the enormity of it all, Jake Camden thought, Jesus Christ, help me. I have the King Kong hangover of all time.
Now, this was saying something. In his checkered career, Jake Camden had experienced his share of hangovers. During his college days, he quickly found that they came in different shapes, sizes, and colors, but that they were all alike in that they were not at all enjoyable experiences.
And this one was a real killer.
His head felt as though his heart had somehow gotten sucked in with his brain and was pounding away for all it was worth to get out, using a hammer in its efforts to escape. His body was one big throbbing ache, clothed in flesh and agony. His mouth felt like a desert cesspit. His abdomen felt as though a group of Boy Scouts were down there, practicing their knot tying.
When he got his breath back to think about more than the fact that he was in pain, Jake thought, where the hell am I?
This was not easy to ascertain.
For one thing, although it wasn’t exactly pitch-black all around him, it wasn’t real bright either. Gloomy would be the appropriate term. Through the haze pounding around his eyeballs, Jake Camden could discern shadowy forms--blocky shapes. A room, then. It had to be some kind of room.
“Gosh,” he groaned. “I’m a regular Sherlock Holmes.”
It was when he moved that things got more interesting.
He couldn’t.
Not appreciably, anyway. He could wiggle his toes (bare, it would seem) and move his hands, but there were restraining belts tied around his ankles, thighs, abdomen, and chest. He could move his head around, but that was just the thing he didn’t want to move, it hurt so.
“Well,” he whispered sadly to himself, after taking a few deep breaths to prevent a total nervous breakdown. “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Stanley.”
He remembered now, of course. Remembered all too clearly that fatal glass of beer with dinner, the rounds rolling in afterward, the blonde, the band, and the irate husband.
And then, crashing down on him like those fabled hundred bottles of beer on the wall, came the memory of those men in suits who had swarmed in on him at the parking lot.
If he hadn’t fully realized it at that point, what with his preoccupation with his present frail state of health, he certainly realized it now:
He was not only in trouble, he was in big trouble. Deep trouble.
He moaned softly to himself, as though the sound of his own voice might soothe him.
Jesus, they’ve got me tied down and what the hell are they going to do to me now?
He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
As though aware of his return to consciousness, the room began to change. Lights crept up from corners like monochrome false dawns.
“Hey!” Jake cried. “What the hell’s going on here? Stop fucking with my head. It’s fucked enough. Who are you! What do you want?”
No answer.
The lights stopped, but they outlined the room sufficiently for Jake to realize what strange geometric configurations comprised it. The place sure as hell didn’t look like anywhere he’d been before ... The ceiling described an odd pattern, juxtaposed by what Jake took to be some kind of symbols hieroglyphics-stitched here and there like wall tattoos. If he wasn’t basically a cynic at heart, he’d be inclined to think that he was someplace incredibly silly, like ... hee ... hee ... an extraterrestrial—ho-ho—spaceship—or something equally unlikely like that.
Of course, it did look awfully alien.
Maybe it was a dream ... yeah ... that was it ... some kind of drugged-out nightmare. That blonde had spiked his drink with LSD or peyote or some other hallucinogenic and now he was undergoing some kind of visionary nightmare.
Of course, he’d never been hung over in a dream before, so that was kind of unlikely...
As though to immediately disabuse him of the nightmare theory, a door opened and something very real, very strange—and yet curiously familiar—walked in.
He totally forgot his hangover.
It was short, this thing, wearing some kind of silvery jumpsuit. It had almond eyes, a bald head, and a pointy chin and no nose; and although it looked something like the creatures that had been featured in Maximillian Schroeder’s first movie, there was something ineffably so different about it that Jake’s breath was taken away.
The creature walked toward him silently, and stopped in front of him. It raised an arm, and Jake Camden could see that held in its slender fingers was a wand of some sort.
The end of the wand suddenly lit with an almost magical, lambent glow.
The creature turned its moist eyes upon him, held the lit wand up, and pulled it through the air a foot above the speechless Jake Camden, moving its mouth, as though muttering an incantation.
Camden opened his mouth to say something smart like, “Please don’t stick that thing up my ass!” or “Where have you been all my life!”
What came out was a scream.
It came out full throttle, and it seemed to last forever, tearing out his tonsils, his uvula, his teeth, and his tongue in its ferocious torrent. It felt as though there were some kind of meaty thumb pressed down on his scream-button in the back of his mind. Only halfway through did he realize that yes, for some reason, his whole being seemed permeated with a deep, all-encompassing fear beyond all explanation. He saw no reason to be afraid of this creature before him—not logically, anyway. He almost felt a sense of deja vu, as though he’d been here before. He’d heard enough testimony about this particular scenario, written about it enough, read about it, even seen it on the big screen enough to make it passé, a cliché. And yet Camden, now smack-dab in the midst of its reality, felt as though the stops of all his adrenal glands had been torn out, and his blood had turned to pure adrenaline.
Just when he wondered if he was going to die from screaming, Jake stopped.
The creature had stepped back a bit, looking down at him with detachment and curiosity with its big, limpid eyes, as though not surprised but a little nonplussed at this reaction.
It waved the wand over Jake, and he could feel the fear subside somewhat.
With time to recover, Jake took in some hasty breaths and looked closely at the thing, straight up into its face. With his being not being ravaged by the fear, he was able to think a little straighter, a little better. From the time this supposed ET had walked in the door, he’d felt something was off about it, and now that it was up very close and he could look into its eyes, he saw that even though they were wet and glistening, there was something very wrong about them.
They didn’t seem awake. They didn’t seem alive.
The only thing that Jake could move was his mouth. They really should have put a restraint around that as well: It was his most powerful weapon.
“Look, you assholes,” he yelled’. “You may be able to fool farm hicks in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with this bullshit, but you can’t fool Jake Camden.”
The creature stopped moving, and bent its head, peering at him curiously from a different angle.
“Come on, you turkeys can do better than this! What is this, Disneyland or something? You know you’ve got me at an angle where I really can’t see, but dollars-to-donuts there are tracks and wire running out of the bottom of this thing. And don’t think I don’t know the word for it. Simulacrum! Am I right? And you’ve got me loaded down with exotic drugs, I bet. Well, thanks a whole hell of a lot, but what I really need is an aspirin, so if you give me that and a glass of water, maybe when I get out of this and write my book I’ll be a little bit merciful.”
Silence. The room seemed to resonate with it.
Jake was getting annoyed.
“You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to?” Actually, he didn’t, not really, but he was following the theory that he and Scarborough had cooked up after visiting that CIA farm in Iowa, and after Scarbor
ough had visited that lady in Baltimore. “Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. You’re trying to make me believe that I’ve been captured and am being examined by aliens. Only it’s a sham, a mock-up, an elaborate form of disinformation. To cover what up, I haven’t got the faintest idea—but that’s what it is, isn’t it? We’ve got some kind of ultra-secret government program here, don’t we? Those guys who picked me up were wearing the standard uniform, folks. They weren’t aliens and they weren’t Men in Black. They were FBI or CIA or God-knows-what other fascist branch of this corrupt government—but that’s what they were!”
Silence again. Jake took in a breath, but then held his tongue.
Was that a whir? A click? The shuffling and whooshing of hydraulic equipment?
The wand in the creature’s hand dulled. The creature’s arm fell to its side. It turned and left the room.
“So show yourselves, you bastards!” said Jake Camden. “Come out and face me!”
He felt a slight prickling at the base of his neck, as though invisible fingers had touched him and sparked onto his skin.
A relaxing wave of darkness fluttered down over him like a cowl, and he passed out.
When Jake Camden awoke again, he did not hurt so badly.
But he was still restrained upon a table like a specimen in some laboratory about to be dissected. Camden felt as though the worst of the hangover had passed—and yet, he was immediately aware of a wrongness inside his body, a wrongness that he immediately diagnosed as drug-related. Now, Jake Camden had done his share of drugs in his life, all the way from steady pot and LSD use in college, to experiments with Ecstasy and freebasing cocaine within the last few years. The cocaine had been his ultimate downfall (he didn’t really count his drinking; he considered alcohol part of his job), but he’d handled that problem pretty much (except for that brief backslide last night). The psychedelic drugs he’d stopped using long ago. What was going on now in his head and body had a faint whiff of the psychotropic. Little flashes of disorientation and paranoia alternated with faintly altered perception. There were subtler elements. Stuff he couldn’t get a handle on. Whatever it was, he knew that he’d been drugged, but he also knew that he somehow was still in control.
He was no longer in the souped-up, bizarre room. No, now he was in some kind of doctor’s office. There were tables and cabinets: white and efficient-looking. The smell of antiseptics hung in the air, that familiar scent of the physician. He noted the faint gleam of instruments here and there. Stainless steel. He sensed the hypodermics, hidden away like wasps, their stingers behind whitewashed walls. Jake Camden cringed, the paranoia blooming in him again. God, he hated needles. Always had, always would. That was why he’d never done heroin, ever. Never been tempted. It would be too much like back when his old man had dragged him to the doctor’s office for that interminable battery of unsympathetic shots in the arm or behind.
Wonderful, he thought. And doubtless these monsters know that fear—it’s probably written out and underlined on whatever report they have on me.
He still couldn’t move. That troubled him as well. However, again he had free use of his mouth. This time, though, he bided his time. He kept quiet.
He didn’t have to wait long. Within a few minutes, the door opened. No golden-eyes extraterrestrial this time. No, this time it was that other obsession of Jake Camden’s: a blonde. A pretty good-looking one too, he was happy to see-and he felt relief that he still noticed such things.
“That’s all right,” the woman said stiffly to someone outside. “He’s restrained and under sedation. I’d prefer to deal with this myself, alone. If I have any problems, I’ll hit the button.”
She closed the door behind her and looked over to Jake, a strange mixture of concern, preoccupation, and eagerness in her eyes. She was dressed in a long white lab coat. Her hair was drawn back into a severe ponytail. She was wearing glasses and a frown.
On the other side of the room was a desk. She strode to this and professionally paged through an open book filled partially with print and partially with scribbled notes.
“Hmmm,” she said and coughed faintly into a hand. “Well now, Mr. Camden. It would appear that you are quite the character. How do you feel?”
“Drugged.”
“Yes.” She held up a small list. “Here we have the exact drugs we’ve been using in this particular case, including the amounts administered. You have a remarkable threshold, Jake. I suspect, however, that should we do a complete physical examination we’d find a great deal of damage. What’s the phrase? Burning the candle at both ends? Apparently, Jake, you’ve been using a three-wick candle. Also, it would seem that you are remarkably unreceptive to the scenario we created for you. Oh well, it doesn’t work for everyone. Only for the highly suggestive. Now then, though. To work. What exactly are you after, Jake Camden? And why are you aiding and abetting a wanted criminal, almost certainly guilty of betraying the interests of the national security of the United States?”
“You mean Doc Scarborough? Shit, he’s not betraying anybody. You guys are CIA, aren’t you?”
“I’m the one asking the questions, Camden. Let me advise you to answer them plainly and truthfully. There are other methods of extracting information besides relatively painless drug combinations.”
“You are CIA. Whew. The stories are true, then. Okay, shit, I don’t want to get tortured, for God’s sake. Don’t your’ notes on me say I’m a physical coward?”
“Not precisely. I don’t think you’ve ever been quite in this sort of situation before, have you?”
“Not quite. But I’m not a great fan of pain.”
The woman got up and went over to him, leaning down close as though for emphasis or intimidation purposes.
“You’ll tell us what you can about Everett Scarborough, then?’
“Sure. I guess. I really don’t know all that much.”
“You seemed to know quite a bit in our little scenario enactment about an hour ago, it would seem. This troubles me a great deal, particularly since you seem to have drawn some ugly conclusions. The implications are that you’ve done research that we are not aware of ... And perhaps told others of your findings. Or worse, written them down.” Her teeth clenched and Jake could smell a touch of perfume about her; a medicinal smell. “Is that it, Jake Camden? Are these findings sitting at some newspaper or book publisher, waiting to be published?”
“No! Hell no! We haven’t gotten that far yet ... I mean, I haven’t ... I mean ... Well, there was this article about Scarborough. But it was mostly how he’d been framed. There wasn’t anything about—umm—scenarios. Or alien simulacrums or disinformation or none of that stuff. Mostly because, sister, I haven’t got the foggiest notion of why you’re carrying on this loony nonsense!”
The woman relaxed somewhat and stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. “You don’t expect me to tell you, do you?”
“No. I expect you to let me out of here! I’m an American citizen, goddammit. I have rights!” The old newspaper-reporter-in-a-jam speech—at least it gave him something to say, and the anger involved helped to clear his head. “I demand at least a phone call to my lawyer!”
The woman permitted herself a smile. “Surely you jest. You gave up any rights when you poked your nose into these matters of national security.”
“National security! What bullshit! And that doesn’t make any difference! Am I arrested? In that case, I get to call my lawyer.”
The woman seemed to think this even funnier. “Mr. Camden ... Jake. You are not arrested. You may leave whenever you want.”
“Then take these straps offa me.”
“Oh yes. One little item. We have to do a little unofficial interrogation. “
“And scramble my brains up a little bit too, huh? Try to get me to buy this alien-abduction line? See if it will work on old Jake. Well, it didn’t work. And you don’t have to interrogate me, because I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“Will you, now?”
“Oh yes?”
“You bet. You’re Dr. Julia Cunningham—a regular CIA Dr. Mengele, according to Scarborough.”
“Am I, now?” Although she tried to keep her composure, Camden could tell that he’d hit his mark. “You seem very sure of that.”
“Well, you’re blonde, in your thirties, attractive, a regular ice queen—and you’re an expert in psychoactive drugs. And don’t you know that I feel a few of those blooming in my brain right now.”
“Does that make a difference—who I am?”
“No, but it proves to me you’re CIA.”
“I thought you’d already established that ... in your own mind, anyway.”
“It proves we’re on the right track. In the investigations.”
“Again, I would think that you would be fairly certain of that after your recent experiences, Mr. Camden:”
“The thing I can’t figure, I mean, the big question have ... is why?”
“I thought that I was the interrogator, Mr. Camden.”
“Oh, you are, you are. I just wanted to get a few facts straight.”
“I think I’ve had just about enough of this,” she said. She strode over to a cabinet, from which she drew out a pre-prepared tray of drug ampules and hypodermics. “Where is Dr. Everett Scarborough, Mr. Camden?”
“Ooops. That’s the one thing I can’t tell you.”
“I thought not.” She examined the bottles, and then removed the protective guard from a disposable hypo. “Are you familiar with the case of William Buckley in Beirut, Mr. Camden?”
“Oh sure, the CIA spook that terrorist organization kidnapped.”
“There was a doctor involved. A man who administered the drugs to William Buckley. Dr. Aziz al Abub. Are you at all familiar with the videotapes that were sent back to the CIA?”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 67
