“Yes. Otherwise, it’s essentially a one-way ticket.”
“Then someone deliberately wanted me to end up at the Overlap?”
“Yes. They knew you wouldn’t be going anywhere else, and they knew that Desmond would be looking for any suspicious activity. The only people from the Seventh who use those old DNA keys anymore are the suspicious type—criminals, rogue agents, and the like.”
Asher let the new information sink in. Apparently, there was no end to how much he had been used.
Jack nudged his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault.” He turned to Wizard. “So, how are we gonna do this?”
Wizard gave it a moment’s thought before replying. “Celia will need to be carried…”
“I got it,” Jack said.
“Actually, I think Asher should carry her,” Wizard said.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing, Jack. It’s just that you are the only one among us with any sort of combat training, and I’m not entirely sure what we will run into. It would be best to have your hands free. And besides, Asher is a strong young man, aren’t you, son?”
Asher didn’t respond, he merely looked on.
“Great! That’s settled then. I’ll just grab my guns and we’ll be off,” Jack said. He headed down the hall to his apartment.
Wizard put the watch around his wrist and gave the other key to Asher. “I’ve slaved the two keys together so you won’t have to activate it. You can just put it in your pocket, that way you’ll have both arms free to carry Celia.”
Asher nodded as Jack returned. Jack checked the power clips on both blasters before holstering them in a shoulder harness underneath his jacket.
“Shall we then, boys?” Wizard asked.
“I’m game,” Jack replied. Jack stood next to Wizard as Asher went to Celia’s bed and picked her up in his arms.
“You don’t drop her, you understand?” Jack told him.
“Don’t worry about me,” Asher said, matching Jack’s tone.
“Alright, old man.” Jack grabbed Wizard’s forearm. “Hit the button.”
Wizard activated the jump-watch, and they walked through the door of Celia’s room, back into the Third Verse.
Chicago Hope
Frank Oberdeen was having his usual hectic day. He woke up early, got the kids ready for school, kissed his ex-therapist, Jody, goodbye, and headed off to work.
Work sucked. It always did.
Frank worked for an insurance company, doing things that he hated doing for people he hated doing things for.
Lucky for Frank, he had put in his two weeks notice, two weeks ago. Today was his last day. He had finally had enough and decided it was time to be a writer. After all, with Jody’s salary, and his working nights part-time at the hospital to pick up the slack, he would have plenty of time during the day to write that novel he’d had tumbling around in his brain since he was twenty.
The hours slowly ticked by, and more than once, Frank thought about just leaving and going home. Truth be told, he didn’t really have anything else to do, so he just waited it out, playing Tetris on his computer and avoiding awkward conversation with any of his co-workers.
One of the office ladies brought in a cake, and over lunch hour they had a small going away party for Frank.
Frank, however, was having a huge fuck-you party in his head. The cake was good, though, chocolate with fudge frosting. Frank knew maybe four of the fifteen people who showed up to the party. He hadn’t even known there were that many people working in the entire office. Thankfully, Steve, Frank’s soon-to-be-ex-boss, was not in attendance.
After lunch, Frank decided to go out for some coffee. There was a fancy coffee shop down the street, and it was a pleasant day. He got a plain-jane cup of coffee and a copy of the Chicago Tribune and returned to his desk to sit out the rest of the day.
The Tribune had little of interest to say, so with three hours left, Frank was again playing games on his computer.
Five o’clock finally came. Frank grabbed his briefcase and his coat and headed for the elevator. His boss, Steve, stood in the hall blocking his way.
Steve held his hands out. “Frank, I just want to say thanks for all your hard work and dedic— ”
“Fuck off, Steve.” Frank walked around him and pushed the button for the elevator.
For the first time he could remember, Frank smiled at work.
Steve stood there with his mouth open, his arms still in his good-bye speech pose.
Frank took the train to his car and then drove the rest of the way home. He knew he should probably get some sleep for his job tonight, but he couldn’t help it, he was too excited. He wanted to celebrate.
He picked up the phone and called Jody, who was on her way home from work. He told her to meet him at their favorite restaurant, he would bring the kids.
Charlie and Jill loved to eat out. It was something that only happened a few times a year, usually on someone’s birthday, so it was a real treat.
By the time they all got back home and put the kids to bed, Frank only had a few minutes alone with Jody before he had to go to the hospital to start his new job.
Frank yawned as he walked through the automatic doors of the hospital. He knew not taking a nap would come back to bite him. He had been training for weeks now, on the weekends, but this was his first shift by himself.
Frank now held the title of MRI technician, a job which Jody had told him was just another opportunity to play computer games. Frank had laughed, but he hoped she was right. The last thing he wanted right now was to be busy. Bob, the tech who trained him, said that the late shift was usually quiet for the MRI department. Unless some emergency came up, he should have a relatively boring time of it.
The nurses at the station gave him a you-look-familiar-but-I-can’t-tell-from-where glance as he walked past them to the elevator. The MRI suite was on the second floor. His station was a small control room behind two large glass windows, through which, you could see the bulky MRI machine on the other side.
Bob was gathering his things together as Frank walked in.
“She’s all yours,” Bob said. “You nervous?”
“A little,” Frank said.
“Ehh, don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine. Besides, you were trained by the best.”
“So you keep telling me,” Frank joked with the overweight technician.
“If you do need anything, the manual is in the bottom drawer on the left, and you have my cell number.”
After giving Frank a few more cliché pieces of advice, Bob left, and then Frank was alone. It was quiet.
That was one of the things he loved most about the job. There were no phones constantly going off, no loud and obnoxious co-workers.
As he sat down, Frank couldn’t help another yawn. The log book didn’t show anything scheduled for tonight. It was going to be a long shift. He pulled out the book he’d started reading earlier in the week and propped his feet up.
Frank was unsure how long he had been staring at the page and not reading when another yawn escaped from him. He needed some coffee.
There was a break room down at the end of the hallway. Frank took his pager, made sure it was on, and clipped it to his belt. He set the book down and walked down the hall.
The coffee pot was still half full, and for a moment Frank thought he might not have to wait that long, but upon inspection, the coffee was nearly cold. He poured it out and brewed a fresh pot.
While the coffee was brewing, Frank realized he had forgotten to bring his coffee cup with him. There were styrofoam cups in the break room, but they barely held enough coffee in them to last Frank the walk back down to his station.
He walked back to retrieve his mug and was a few steps from the door when he saw a flash of light come from inside. He walked in, expecting a doctor, or a nurse, but what he found was three strange men. One of them, the youngest, had a woman draped over his shoulder. The oldest man had shoulder l
ength white hair and was holding some sort of screen in his hands. It reminded Frank of something from the show Star Trek. The man in the middle, however, was who concerned Frank the most. He held a gun, and it was pointed right at him.
“You know how to run this thing?” the gunman asked.
Frank could only manage a nod.
“Good. We need your help.”
Frank thought of what he could do to call for help, but it wasn’t as if there was a silent alarm he could trip. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure the hospital even had an alarm system.
The man with the gun motioned for him to get behind the control panel. Frank did, and the other two men positioned the woman on the machine’s bed.
“Make sure they take off any metallic objects she might have on her. Jewelry, watches, earrings—anything like that,” Frank instructed.
The gunman relayed the instructions to the older man, who he referred to as Wizard.
Must be some kind of code name, Frank thought. He does kind of look like a wizard, though.
Frank started up the machine and a low-pitched humming filled the room. The noise didn’t seem to come from any particular source.
“What are we looking for?” Frank asked, his monitors began displaying the images from the machine.
“Don’t worry about it, just crank up the juice.”
Frank hesitated, unsure of what the effects on the girl might be. His hesitation got him a gun shoved in his face.
“Just do it.”
The screen displays were like nothing Frank had ever seen before in his training. Instead of displaying the brain and internal layout of the woman, there was a cloud of tiny dots. They were swirling around inside the woman.
Frank boosted the power output of the machine. He watched as the swirling cloud slowly came to a halt.
The woman had opened her eyes. The wizard was speaking to her, but Frank couldn’t hear what was being said.
He checked the monitors again, and saw that the dots were moving again, but not in the same way as before. They were in a stream now, pouring out of the woman’s body.
Frank looked up and thought he could see dark wisps floating above the woman as she laid on the bed, like smoke from a fire.
His eyes sweeping back and forth from the monitors to what was happening in the other room, Frank tracked the progress. The cloud was still floating over the woman when she got up.
“You can shut it off now,” the gunman said.
The machine slowly grew quiet, and Frank watched as the woman stood and extended her arm. Frank couldn’t see anything attached to her hand, but the cloud of particles followed the motions her hand made.
The woman put her hand down by her side and the particles fell down to the floor in a pile. Frank thought it resembled a pile of gun powder.
The gunman went into the other room and took the woman in his arms, kissing her. They spoke about something, but the sound proof glass prevented Frank from hearing anything. They arranged themselves in a line facing Frank. The gunman grabbed the old man’s forearm, and the woman took the younger man’s arm before she looked directly at Frank and blew him a kiss.
Frank blushed, but wasn’t quite sure why. He watched as the three men and the woman walked through the door of the MRI room and then he saw the same flash of light as before. He ran out of the control room and sprinted into the hall, but when he got there, the hall was silent and empty.
Frank walked back into the control room, dug around in his bag, and brought out his coffee cup. He was no longer tired, but he wanted something to do while he spent the next six hours and the better part of the next day thinking about what the hell had just happened.
He went down the break room, filled up his coffee cup, and returned. There was a broom in the closet, and Frank took it into the MRI room to sweep up whatever it was that had come out of that woman. He walked over to the place on the floor where it should have been, but he found nothing. There was no trace of the dark powdery stuff.
Great, maybe I’m going crazy, Frank thought. He decided since he had the broom out he would sweep up anyway. Sure, the hospital had a janitorial staff, but he needed to do something physical right now.
He finished sweeping, sat back down at his station, and tried to go back to his book again. He found that he was having trouble concentrating, his mind kept wandering back to those strange people. He just sat there. For the next six hours, Frank replayed the details over and over in his head. The way they were dressed, and the way the light glinted off the gun. The more Frank replayed the memory, the more he was convinced it wasn’t a normal gun. He hadn’t seen any kind of hammer on it, and the opening of the barrel had been oval, not circular.
With ten minutes left in his shift, Frank suddenly had the thought that maybe he should call the police. Why he hadn’t thought of it before, he had no idea. After thinking about it more, Frank thought it more likely that they would have him committed. Who would believe him, especially after he had been awake for over twenty-four hours? No, there was no evidence to support what had happened, and there wasn’t any harm done, that Frank could tell. He would keep his head down and act like the whole thing hadn’t happened. Maybe in a few years he would be able to tell the boys about it after one too many beers at the bar, but for now, he needed this job.
Frank Oberdeen clocked out, drove home, laid down, and went to sleep, his exhaustion finally catching up to the adrenaline rush. If he dreamed at all that night, Frank couldn’t remember.
Upon waking, he replayed the events of last night over in his mind. He went over to the desk in his home office, and pulled out his old journal. He started writing: It might very well have been the longest day of his life…
Back From The Dead
Celia could tell that Jack had been more worried about her than he let on. If Jack could read her mind, he would see that she was growing quite fond of him as well. She only hoped that whenever they got to the bottom of whatever was going on, they could spend some quiet time together and sort out some of their feelings. She knew this little island in the middle of the Mediterranean that would be perfect. Right now, however, she had a bigger problem—her father was missing.
Wizard caught her up on what she had missed while she was out of it. She hadn’t missed much. Desmond had gone missing, Jack had arrived at the correct cause of Celia’s illness, and then they went to the Third to implement the treatment.
“Where would he go?” Celia thought aloud. “It’s not like him to just take off.”
“Yeah, the least he could have done was leave us a note,” Jack joked, trying to lighten the mood of everyone gathered in the missing man’s office.
Celia started.
“Maybe he did.” Celia walked over to her father’s desk and sat down in the chair. “When I was a little girl, I used to draw my father pictures while he was working. Then, whenever he’d have to leave his office, I would hide them somewhere in his desk.
“I sat patiently at first, when he returned, but I must have grown restless, because he picked up on something I was doing and tried to catch my thoughts. Of course, I shielded them, and so the game began.
“He searched through his drawers and found the picture I had made. The next day when I did it again, I found a note for me that he had written, a short story about a little girl. It was in the exact place that I was going to hide the new picture. The day after, I picked a new place in his desk, and was surprised to find another story for me.
“The game goes on, still to this day, spaced out over years sometimes. I still haven’t been able to figure out how he knows the exact place that I will try to hide the picture.”
“So you think that your father left you a note somewhere in his desk?” Jack asked. “Cute game, by the way…”
“Shut it, Spade,” Celia said, as she rifled through her father’s desk. Nothing. There was nothing out of the ordinary there, and definitely no note to tell her where he was or what he was doing.
Jack put an a
rm around her shoulders. “It was worth a shot. We’ll find him though, Celia. Don’t worry.”
Celia said nothing. It was comforting just to be held right now, and she was tired from the days long ordeal of fighting off the EMF-nanites. It had taken every ounce of concentration that she had to keep them from completely taking over her body.
“Come on, Celia. Let’s get you to bed. You’re exhausted.” Jack led her down the hall to his apartment. He would have taken her to hers, but he didn’t know what floor it was on, and his was closer.
Jack laid her down on the bed, took off her shoes, and tucked her in. He gave her a kiss on her forehead. “Sleep well, and dream good.”
“That’s sweet…” Celia mumbled, already on her way to unconsciousness.
“My mother used to say it to me every night when I was little,” Jack whispered, but Celia was already asleep. “I’ll come join you later.”
Back in Desmond’s office, Wizard was explaining the finer points of the Multiverse to young Asher when Jack returned.
“…and that’s how babies are made,” Wizard said, “…at least in the Seventh.”
“The man and woman never have sex?”
“No need for it, at least not for procreation. It just gets in the way of all the gene therapy they do to the embryo.”
“Gene therapy?” Asher asked. He looked helplessly lost.
“I keep forgetting how green you are, my boy,” Wizard said. “The parents choose which traits they want their child to have. Eye color, hair type, boy or girl, smart or genius. Most everything is decided before the child is even born—”
“Sorry to break up story time, but I need to know if you’ve heard anything more on Desmond’s whereabouts,” Jack interrupted.
Wizard seemed a bit disappointed about having to pause his teaching session, but he answered Jack politely. “No, Jack, I haven’t yet, but you’ll be the first to know when I do.”
“Thanks, Wiz. I’m gonna head to bed.” Jack stretched his arms and yawned. “Wake me if you hear anything.”
Strangers and Shadows Page 18
