by Mat Nastos
“I’ll show those bastards exactly what sort of killing-machine they created.”
Zuz’s eyes bulged at his friend’s matter-of-fact statement and actions, “Mal, man, you need to switch to decaf ay-sap. If you don’t, they’re going to have to replace your head when it explodes.”
“Like the dude from ‘Scanners?’ Mal smiled, trying to lighten things back up.
“Precisely!” Zuz’s enthusiastic declaration was loud enough to cause the duty nurse to peek her head in to make sure everything was OK in his room.
“Is everything OK in here, Mister Zuzelo,” Nurse Jensen asked, giving Mal the once over at least twice.
“He’s fine, just a bit over-stimulated at the moment,” Mal gave her his most charming smile. To no one’s surprise, it had little effect on the rather up-tight member of the nighttime hospital staff.
Glaring at Mal for another few seconds just so he knew she was watching him, Nurse Jensen’s head disappeared back through the door.
Continuing as if there had been no interruption, Zuz philosophized with the utmost of sincerity, “You know, I’ve always thought the Scanners series was highly underrated.”
Shaking his head and settling back in the less-than-comfortable gray-corduroy padded hospital chair, Mal smirked, “Well, except for that ‘Scanner Cop’ crap. Those movies sucked balls.”
Zuz sat straight up in his bed, nearly tearing loose the numerous wires and tubes attached to his injured body, a huge grin splitting his face.
“You know, I’ve never loved another man as much as I love you right now, Mal.”
“I’m hard not to love,” Mal chuckled.
Leaning forward, Zuz reached out to touch the top of Mal’s metal arm, reassuringly, and whispered in a conspiratorial manner, “In the back of my head, I’ve always thought ‘Scanners,’ ‘Firestarter,’ and ‘Dreamscape’ were all connected. There are numerous connections between the writers of those movies and the Stargate Project. The films were all used to help desensitize the American populace.”
“Desensitize? To what?” asked Mal, goading Zuz into a frenzy and amazed at the level to which the man seemed to speak with his hands.
“To the existence of a psychic division of the FBI. One with the federally mandated mission of keeping tabs on the thoughts and minds of US citizens,” Zuz finished with a robust, “Duh.”
“Hey, what about ‘Carrie?’ Mal yanked a pillow out from beneath the patient’s bed, jamming it down behind his head. With full knowledge of what would come next, Mal then tossed out a seemingly innocent comment, “They were both written by Stephen King and both about girls who discovered they had psychic abilities they couldn’t control?”
“Oh Em Gee!” a shriek more suited to a teen-aged ‘Twilight’ fangirl meeting Robert Pattinson than a grown man in his forties sprang from somewhere deep inside David Zuzelo. “You’re like Criss Angel, Mal…you just freaked my mind! That totally matches up with my research. Get me a laptop, I need to blog!”
Mal stretched out as much as he could in his seat and let his best friend, his only friend, ramble on long into the night. Tomorrow he’d have to deal with the consequences of his actions and whatever future he had. Tonight, though…tonight was about friendship.
*****
When Nurse Jensen woke Zuz in the morning to take blood and change his bedpan, Mal had vanished.
“Where did he go?” Zuz asked groggily, rolling over onto his side to allow Jensen to do her job.
“Who? Your strange friend?”
Zuz nodded, wincing a little as his catheter moved in a way that wasn’t agreeable to his more delicate parts.
“He left about an hour ago. Said he had to get ready for work,” her face scrunched up in distaste. “No offense, Mister Zuzelo, but that guy creeped me out. Seemed on edge, like he was hiding from something.”
Locking gazes with the medical worker, Zuz said, “He’s had a tough time. His fiancée just passed away.”
“This woman has the bedside manner of Doctor Doom,” Zuz thought to himself.
The nurse almost dropped the filled bedpan in embarrassment. “Oh.”
She avoided her patient’s blistering glare and wrapped up her work as quickly as humanly possible. Nurse Jensen was making a beeline for the door and freedom when she stopped and fumbled for something in the pocket of her scrubs.
“Before he left, your friend asked me to give this to you when you woke up this morning. It seemed important.”
Scuttling back over to Zuz in the center of the room, the nurse handed Zuz a folded scrap of paper before disappearing into the hall once more.
Zuz quickly unfolded the note. Torn from a piece of paper from a medical chart, Zuz read the clean half-cursive script Malcolm Weir had written on the back. It contained a phone number and the words:
“Call me anytime, my friend. -M.”
David Zuzelo smiled, carefully refolded the paper and tucked it away. He knew everything would be OK.
EPILOGUE
Consciousness slammed back into Gordon Kiesling like a high speed car crash. Consciousness and a pain so intense it took his breath away.
The pain bored its way into his skull through the bone just between his eyes and seemed to filter down along every nerve ending in his arms and legs.
What the hell is going on, thought Kiesling as he tried unsuccessfully to force his eyelids open. Why couldn’t he seem to move? Where was he?
Muted voices from what felt like light years away touched his ears, along with the low frequency hum of large machines at work.
Straining against whatever was holding him down and keeping his body from rising, Kiesling tried to demand some answers from whoever was in earshot. To command them to set him free or face the consequences.
All the attempt produced was a series of garbled, unintelligible sounds from a jaw and tongue that refused to cooperate with Kiesling’s desires.
The sound of the voices returned, this time in conversation with each other, in response to the prone man’s outburst.
A series of slow, purposeful footsteps approached Kiesling’s prone position. He could tell there were at least three people in the room with him: two pairs of flat soled shoes flapped roughly against the more familiar staccato rapid fire of a woman’s high heels. The rich smell of lavender perfume filled the director’s nostrils, causing his heart to speed up.
Melissa, he thought! He must be in one of the remote medical sites operated by Project: Hardwired. They’d rescued him from Weir’s attack. He was saved!
Kiesling’s voice grunted and grumbled once more and was answered by the sound of Ms. Roslan’s own voice, “He’s awake?”
“Yes,” remarked a second, male voice, unfamiliar to Kiesling. “The speed of his recuperation is astounding.”
The feel of cool, latex-wrapped hands moved across Kiesling’s form, and up to his face, pushing it from side to side.
“Can he hear us,” came a deep bass voice that caused Kiesling more than a bit of discomfort.
Fountain! What is he doing here, thought Kiesling as he tried to open his eyes once more, and failed. His arms seemed tied down and he was unable to reach up and find out what was keeping him blind.
“Oh, yes,” responded the unknown voice. “The readouts are showing that the subject is fully conscious now. You may speak to him, but he won’t be able to do much in the way of responding.”
“Excellent. That’s precisely how I’ve wished every conversation I’ve had with Former Director Kiesling would go,” said Fountain, voice filled with gloating.
Kiesling struggled in place. “Former” Director Kiesling, his mind almost flatlined at the thought. He had to find out exactly what was going on. To set things straight.
“Can you do something about the tape on his eye?” asked the Congressman. “I want him to see me.”
The former head of Project: Hardwired began flailing in a futile effort to sit up.
“Hold him down and I’ll remove the tape from his e
ye,” came the unknown voice.
Kiesling continued to squirm as two pairs of hands forced his body back down onto the cold metal table he had been resting upon. A third pair, the ones covered in latex, forced his head to one side. Shaking with rage, there was nothing Kiesling could do but lie back and give up the control he had fought his entire life to obtain.
One of the latex coated hands found whatever it had been searching for and pulled back, sending a ripping, shredding pain along the skin of Kiesling’s face as his right eye was freed.
The tearing pain was joined by a searing one as his eye fluttered open and allowed a cold, terrible light to shine directly into his optic nerves.
At first, blurry forms against a bright white backdrop was all Gordon Kiesling could make out. Slowly, after a handful of blinks and some squinting, the forms sharped into a trio of familiar shapes: Ms. Roslan, dressed in a sharp navy blue pants suit—Kiesling never let her wear the dreadful things, always preferring a more attractive skirt-jacket combination; the hated Representative Michael Fountain, in one of his famous off-the-rack jacket and trousers, looking as rumpled as ever; and the owner of the unknown voice, a small man wrapped in the trappings of a surgeon, with a shock of thinning red hair sprouting haphazardly out of the top of his wrinkle-covered head.
Kiesling immediately recognized the man as a member of a defunct bio-tech unit Dr. Ryan had been managing in the early days of Project: Hardwired. When the group had been unceremoniously fired due to the success of the Hardwired team, Kiesling had promptly forgotten the man’s name and his existence.
Doctor Gostler? Gohrman? Grossman? Yes, that was it! Doctor Bruce Grossman filled the scope of Kiesling’s vision, momentarily blotting out the harsh surgical lights hanging above the injured body of the man. The relief was short-lived as Grossman replaced the blocked light with one from his penlight.
After waving the transilluminator back and forth for a few seconds to judge Kiesling’s reactions, Grossman stepped back and gestured to Fountain.
“He’s ready for you, Congressman.”
Vowing to have Grossman killed with his little flashlight once he was back to his old self, Kiesling wondered why the scientist had kept his left eye covered. Fountain’s giant gray-haired head slid into view, replacing the little ginger doctor’s visage, and chased the thought away.
“Hello, hello,” Fountain wagged the fingers of his left hand as if to gain an infant’s attention.
A grunt that tried vainly to be a rather vicious stream of obscenities directed at the middle-aged congressman tumbled out from between Kiesling’s teeth and down his half-numb chin.
“Shhhh, it’s ok, Gordon,” smiled Congressman Fountain with all the warmth of a dead fish. “You’re safe.”
Kiesling calmed down, interested to hear what Fountain had to say before he had Ms. Roslan shoot him in the back for his insolence. Hopefully he’d learn what exactly happened after Designate Cestus blew up Abraxas-Prime.
“I can see you’re wondering what happened to you. How you came to be in my…care,” crooned Fountain. “One of the GMR teams…”
“GMR team Epsilon with Designate Ballista,” finished Roslan in a manner all too familiar for Kiesling’s taste.
From his spot on the operating table, Kiesling watched his assistant with haunted eyes as he listened to Fountain’s story.
“Yes. Thank you, Melissa,” the nervous tic burned in an unpleasant manner in Kiesling’s forehead. Fountain continued, “GMR team Epsilon found you deep within the wreckage, clinging to life. Project: Hardwired, however was dead.”
Moving to sit on the edge of the table Kiesling’s inert form lay upon, Fountain loosened his tie and continued, “Needless to say, our overseers out in Washington were not pleased with the situation. Billions of dollars in collateral damage. Billions more in research and development lost. Hundreds injured or killed. It was a mess.”
To Ms. Roslan, Fountain queried, “What’s that military word they use when the shit hits the fan, Melissa my dear?”
The use of her first name ground into Kiesling’s gut. He knew something was wrong.
“I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘fubar,’ sir.”
“Fubar! That’s it,” Fountain snapped his fingers happily at remembering the word. “The situation was Fubar.” The politician gave an exaggerated sigh of exhaustion and continued, “While I was able to place most of the blame on our lovely Doctor Ryan, our bosses wanted someone’s head for it. I’m afraid the bulk of that blame fell on you and I, my friend.”
Fountain looked down, eyes dark. For a split second, Kiesling thought he caught a glimpse of regret. Of sorrow. It all vanished when a smile cracked Fountain’s face from ear to ear.
“Fortunately for me, Former Director Kiesling, I wasn’t as replaceable as you had thought,” oozed Fountain, grinning with crooked teeth that had never known the touch of dental whiteners. “Unfortunately for you, Former Direct Kiesling, you were.”
Fountain reached up to maneuver a steel framed surgical mirror down from the overhead lighting array for Kiesling to get a better look of what the clean-up crews from Project: Hardwired had found in the shattered remains of the US Bank Building.
The horror of what he saw nearly stopped Kiesling’s heart.
Both legs were gone: the right taken just above the knee, and all that remained of the left was a bloody hodge-podge of gore soaking his hip socket.
The flesh of his left arm was gone nearly to his shoulder, with bones showing along his forearm.
More wires, tubes and hoses than Kiesling had ever seen in one place in his life ran in and out of the terrible puckered wound that now existed where his chest had been. Strange fluids flowed freely into his devastated body.
Worst of all was his face and the empty left eye socket that glared back at him.
The low, garbled rumbling of pure despair began to build deep within the remains of his chest as Kiesling snapped his eye closed to shut out what he had seen. The sound was strangled in his throat by a primal scream.
A geyser of nearly black blood and ooze caused Fountain to leap back, nearly stumbling over Doctor Grossman as he scrambled for a handkerchief from an inner breast pocket.
Once the outburst had subsided to a quiet sobbing, Fountain hunched back over, leaning close enough for the Kiesling to hear his whisper, “The government has invested way too much money in you to just let you go and die, I’m afraid. Lucky for you, we’ve got a position for you in Doctor Grossman’s newly approved department.”
Kiesling glared back at the politician as best he could with one bloodshot eye. He was greeted by another smile from Fountain and the sound of what seemed to be a virtual army of people entering the room.
Bobbing his head in faux-sympathy, Fountain added as he stood up, “Welcome to Project: Tiamat, Former…Director…Kiesling…”
As if on cue, what sounded like a virtual army of men entered the room behind Kiesling’s trio of tormentors. Fountain looked around at the group of medical staff and scientists that had gathered around the table, then turned back to the battered Gordon Kiesling one final time and said, “As its first test subject.”
Kiesling’s eye snapped open with realization as Fountain stood and placed his arm around Ms. Roslan, pushing her towards the door the surgical team had entered through.
“Come, Melissa, it’s time to get back to work.”
All of the blood drained from Kiesling’s face, along with his hopes as he watched his two former colleagues navigate their way through the mass of men and women in lab coats and surgical scrubs, faces filled with hungry, anxious stares at the abomination spread out on the table before them.
“Doctor Grossman, he’s all yours,” grinned Fountain as he and Ms. Roslan moved for the exit. “And make sure Former Director Kiesling is awake for as long as possible.”
Gordon Kiesling raged against his bonds, trying to get free, his remaining eye wide with fear. Again and again he called out to the woman who once answ
ered his every beck and call, to no avail.
Stepping to the foot of the cool steel surgical table, Doctor Grossman adjusted his latex gloves with a snap and motioned to the waiting crowd.
“Ladies, gentlemen, let’s begin.”
The cadre of technicians, surgeons, chemists and biologists crowded around Kiesling, whose screams were silenced by the vile, wet sounds of progress.
*****
THE END
Malcolm Weir will return in “The Cestus Contract.”
If you enjoyed this book, make sure to leave a review where you purchased it online!
AFTERWORD
Bullets, Blood & Blades
“The Cestus Concern” began life, believe it or not, as a comic book proposal to a well-known creator. He had been looking around for pitches to relaunch characters and creations from earlier in his life to reinvigorate his career. When we were introduced by a mutual friend, I jumped at the chance and tossed out an idea I’d had brewing in my head for a hardcore action story that seemed tailor-made for a rather obscure and forgotten property of his.
The pitch was made and accepted. He loved it and wanted me to get to work on the full comic right away. Being an excitable little monkey, I jumped in with both feet and had an absolute blast writing the story. For me, there is nothing better than a big budget, testosterone-filled, action story. Movies like “City of Violence,” “The Raid,” “Rapid Fire,” “Fist of Legend” and “Black Belt Jones” are my bread and butter.
Bullets, blood and blades: I can’t get enough of that stuff.
About halfway through writing the comic I began to hear a little voice, nagging away in the back of my head. It asked why was I going to just give away all my hard work to someone else—give away all of my rights as a creator to someone else? I ignored the voice for a while, but it came back once I had finished and was preparing to turn the scripts into the aforementioned comic book creator.
