by Jacob Hammes
Cynthia wasn’t done yet. She had her pistol out in the blink of an eye and started squeezing off rounds toward the murderous imposters. The loud banging pistol threatened to blow her eardrums out with every round she sent, yet she continued shooting as if she couldn’t feel a thing. Thankfully, Stephen still had his wits about him. With one of his huge arms, he grabbed Cynthia around the waist and darted off down the corridor in the opposite direction of the gunmen. With her serving to cover the three retreating individuals, they made it to the end without so much as a scratch.
There was no return of gunfire. The two killers were either biding their time or Cynthia had already ended it. Whatever the scenario, Stephen didn’t wait to find out. He had his own pistol in hand, crouching low near the corner of the hallway.
“We’re Federal Agents,” Stephen shouted down the hallway. “Put your weapons down now and we won’t kill the two of you outright.”
“That’s not very Federal Agent-like,” the man said in a thick Spanish accent that had not been present before. “Unfortunately, we need that girl more than you do. Could you please send her down to us, or we will just keep killing doctors and nurses as they come around the corner?”
Stephen contemplated what they were saying for a moment. He couldn’t be serious about ruthlessly killing anyone who walked around a corner, could he? They had already killed two people without blinking an eye, so it was very possible that they would kill more.
“C’mon,” the woman taunted this time. Her voice was deep and sultry, also with a Spanish twinge. “You need to give her over to us before more people die, agents. You know how this works. Give us the girl and you get to keep others from dying for no reason.”
A door opened up at the end of the hall and a man immediately screamed a guttural cry as bullets tore through his body, putting him down before he knew what was happening. The fake detectives had been serious.
“What could these guys want with her?” Stephen whispered to Cynthia. She didn’t answer. Something inside of her was working overtime. She was formulating a plan, or so Stephen thought.
He poked a hand around the corner and heard the clap of the silenced pistol and the snap of tiles as they were blown into smithereens. He gladly pulled an undamaged hand back around the corner.
“You want me to give you the girl, but you’re going to blow me away first chance you get!” he hollered down the hallway.
“Forgive me,” the man said, laughing. “I’m a little twitchy. I mean, you do have a trigger happy girl down there who tried to blow us all away. Wouldn’t you be nervous, too?”
Suddenly Stephen heard the woman yell something in a foreign language. The voice he heard gave him instant relief.
“Police,” he heard someone at the end of the hallway shout. “Put your hands where I can see them.”
Cynthia smiled and rubbed her hand, somehow content with what was happening at the other end of the hallway. She might have known something was going to transpire that would get them off the hook, by the look on her face. If she had, she should have known to get farther away from the corner. The quiet clicks of silenced pistols were met with the loud banging of heavy police revolvers. More tiles started flying off the walls and floor and they crawled farther into the nook they were taking cover in.
Henry was heading down to speak with someone who might have what he was looking for. Sometimes, pieces of radioactive material had to be transported from one hospital to another inside heavy, lead-lined boxes. He was hoping to get his hands on one of them so they could transport this mystery box inside of it.
Truthfully, he didn’t even know whether or not using a container like that would offer any help. He didn’t know what they were up against. It would be up to Marcus, David, and Brenda to figure out what was happening with the mystery weapon. He was only optimistic that it might help them to transport the thing.
He was waiting for someone to come down and speak with him when he heard the very faint booms of what he thought to be doors slamming. In a matter of seconds, he heard the bustle of worried men and women as they piled out into hallways to see what was going on. Just second later, alarms and claxons started urging people to the nearest exits.
It simply wasn’t possible something was happening in the hospital that would force an evacuation that didn’t coincide with the UOD’s presence. Taking the bangs he heard as warnings, he, too, made for the nearest exit. Once on his way, he queued up his radio and started jabbering away.
“Cynthia, Stephen—you guys alright?”
“Barely,” Cynthia came back almost instantly. “Some assholes tried to kill us. They’d have gotten away with it, too, but one of them was clumsy. From the looks of it, one of them might get away. The other is lying in a pool of her own blood.”
“Were you shooting at them up there?”
“Hell yes, she was,” Stephen sounded angry. “She about blew my eardrums clean out of my head. Anyway, the police showed up and finished it for us. I’d stay away from the exits downstairs, though; the whole group might be coming your way.”
“Well tell me what this guy looks like and maybe I can stop him?”
“A blond dude that’s probably around twenty five,” Cynthia said. A bit of anger had found its way into her voice. “He’s wearing a black collared shirt, but you should be able to tell who he is from that blond hair. They killed two innocent people up here. If you see the man, just shoot him.”
Henry, for all his skill as an agent and otherwise, could not have done anything to stop the man. He could, however, see the escaping assailant as he exited through a door just two hundred yards away, but it was over the heads of a hundred or more moving doctors, nurses, patients, and other staff. From his vantage point on a bench, he knew he would never be able to squeeze off a round without hurting an innocent bystander. All he could do was suck his teeth and hope the police were after the suspect, too.
Chapter 6
Marcus didn’t know what to expect as they moved toward the hazard-tape warning circle. The police officer responsible for pulling the girl off the boat had been taken to a hospital, too. His description was one of horror. Apparently the boat got worse and worse the longer he stayed on it. The little girl had grown horrid appendages before his eyes, bug-like in nature. She had screamed something he could never begin to comprehend before he just made the decision to pick her up and pull her off.
Once outside the circle he had simply passed out along with the girl.
Since then, the only people who had even attempted to approach the ship did so to put the yellow hazard-tape up. They found that going as far as the police officer had gone was not only impossible, but might very well kill them. No one wanted to risk their lives for such a thing.
Marcus and his team were the last bastion of hope to get the box shut off, or pull it off the boat, before the Coast Guard hauled the entire ship out to sea and blew it sky high. Dressed in full hazmat suits, they approached the tape cautiously. If they were going to experience some psychotic dreams, they wanted to do it as close to one another as possible. This way, perhaps they could talk themselves through it.
As a precaution, the woman who had greeted them held onto their weapons before letting them into the hazmat suits.
The vast amount of sensors the team had brought proved to them they were in over their head. The spectrum analyzer told them they were receiving strong signals across a broad range of frequencies, which didn’t match anything they had ever seen before. The Geiger counter remained silent, as did the EMF detectors, yet a few of the other sensors hummed along with an obvious energy.
David was first to duck under the tape. He stopped short for a moment while Marcus and Brenda eyed him expectantly. He stood up tall, took a deep breath, and smiled their direction.
“It’s something,” he said, obviously affected by something they could not see, mere meters away. “It’s something else, I’ll tell you. You guys might want to hang back.”
Phillip scoffed. He wa
s next to duck beneath the hazard tape. Marcus was not one to be left behind and ducked beneath a second later. Bringing up the rear, Brenda made her way beneath the tape, too.
The sky seemed dimmer than it had been, just feet from where they were standing. In fact, the entire shipyard seemed as if it were covered in a smoky sludge that was absorbing all light. Marcus wondered whether or not this was what the other people felt. Since they had all been trained to experience out-of-this-world phenomena, he wondered if he was going to be less susceptible to the hysteria.
It wasn’t so. Fear like nothing he had ever experienced washed over him as he saw his coworkers change form before his eyes. They weren’t frightening in and of themselves—grotesquely disfigured stick-thin bodies caught fire as they moved, leered at him with demonic embers from black pits that used to be eyes. To anyone else, they might be horrifying, but to Marcus they were, as he knew, hallucinations.
What startled him was that he felt the things he was seeing. He could feel his feet trudging through the thick sludge. He could hear the distant crackle of raging fire, smell the burning flesh of some unknown hell into which he had just stepped. Oddly, even that didn’t really matter to him.
Marcus focused. What was bothering him so much about this place? He knew it wasn’t real. If it were, people would complain that anyone who crossed the border would have disappeared into some other dimension. No, this place wasn’t real. It was all just a figment of his imagination, propagated by the mystery weapon on that boat. Somehow, it was doing a good job at stimulating his sense of fear.
“Jesus Christ.” Brenda looked freakish. Fangs, demon hooks instead of hands…she even had an entire cage of ribs dangling out beneath her scabbed breasts.
“You all look like rabid dogs to me,” Phillip said, trying his hardest to keep it together. “David, how are you holding up?”
“Eh,” he shrugged. “I’m not like you guys. I’m okay with this. In fact, why don’t you let me get on the ship by myself and figure things out? I’m learning to control this sort of thing anyway.”
“Good idea,” Marcus groaned. “But I’ll accompany you to the ship, at least.”
Marcus had experienced all that he wanted of that feeling, yet he knew David might need assistance. He just hoped he wouldn’t become a burden. If they were feeling this way, just meters from the warning tape, lord knew what they would be feeling at the source of the disturbance. He decided he would be more useful outside the confines of the ship, where he could shout for help if needed.
“I’m turning around,” Brenda said. Without another word, she made her way back across the barrier and collapsed onto all fours. Phillip was just steps behind her and had much the same reaction. They both hit the ground as if they had been through hell.
“You sure about this, boss?” David stood taller than Marcus had ever seen him. His demon legs and hands moved menacingly through the air as he waited for a response. Even though Marcus wondered whether or not he would make it, he smiled his best smile and nodded his head.
“Let’s get a move on.”
Each step through the affected area left Marcus feeling worse. Flames shot up higher from the boat, as if it were really on fire. His palms started sweating as shadow men encroached from every side of the circle, smiling with bright teeth and eyes, though without definite bodies. His body felt heavy in the sludge, too, as if it weighed more in this ethereal plain of existence.
It was a quick trip to the ship though, and David moved as lively as he ever did. Marcus was happy to grab ahold of one of the thick logs jetting out of the pier and close his eyes. Though it shut out the visions, it did nothing to quell the fear. It was as if Marcus was living his worst nightmare, though this wasn’t one of them. In fact, Marcus had lived that out long ago.
This was something different. If the object inside the boat was making Marcus afraid for no reason, it must have been emitting some strange radiation. Perhaps an intensely oscillating machine was forcing out huge amounts of radio frequency radiation. Marcus had heard of RF radiation giving people instant migraines and nausea. Maybe if it could do those things, it could also make people see things which weren’t there.
He opened his eyes, surprised that the line of shadows hadn’t advanced on him. They shimmered like black smoke just outside his reach. With all the religious studies he had been through, Marcus really did wonder whether or not he had been transported into the deepest recesses of hell. Men who had cast spells and never recovered came to mind—they had been driven mad by demons, let loose by the magician never to return to bondage again.
Suddenly Marcus felt as light as a feather. He doubled over on himself and squinted as he went to his hands and knees. The bright sun which had just moments ago been filtered through some smoky haze was normal again. He could no longer see the demonic shadow men, or hear the crackling of fires, or smell the burning of flesh. Instead, a strong breeze forced the water to lap aggressively at the concrete dock.
David had shut the thing off. In just moments, he made his way back up through the ship onto the dock. From here, Marcus could see that there was blood inside the ship; lots and lots of blood. David had some smeared on his hazmat suit booties as he struggled off the boat beneath the obvious weight of the box.
There was nothing special about it. It looked like a piece of machinery. Painted with nautical paint in a grey tone, the thing seemed as if it might house a motor, but it didn’t seem different than any other piece of wrought steel machinery that he had ever seen. Marcus couldn’t help but wonder if this was what had been making them all sick.
“Can you get one side of this thing?” David broke into Marcus’s thought pattern. He was really struggling beneath the weight of the box, though it only seemed to occupy about two cubic feet. “It’s heavy as all hell.”
Marcus was amazed at how good he felt after the doom-and-gloom world from which he had just reemerged. It felt like he had just let all the bad things that had ever been bothering him go in one large purging. It made him wonder what such a terrible weapon would ever be used for. That is, until he glanced back inside the ship. The blood that reflected in the light from this close proximity made him wonder how many people had really died aboard.
“Where are we taking it?” David asked. Sweat glistened on his forehead. Marcus knew it wasn’t because of the strenuous activity of lifting the heavy box. He could probably pick the box up three times over and walk just as far without much trouble. The thing had definitely taken a toll on him, Marcus could tell.
“To the back of one of the trucks,” Marcus answered. “We’ll just put the thing down and go back in to see if there’s any more evidence we can use.”
Brenda tested the waters, inching forward past the yellow warning tape arc that had been keeping her back. Since David and Marcus had the box, she figured the problem with the hallucinations had to have been solved. Cautiously, she put one foot slowly in front of the other before breaking into a slow jog.
Phillip was quick to shout back to the police officers before he, too, headed past the security line. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity as agents from every branch of government bounded out past the line toward the ship. In mere seconds, the police had to once again set up a boundary to keep emergency responders from entering the yacht so that they could clear the ship first.
Three separate agency representatives approached the UOD agents. Each one of them sported a thick yellow suit and a hazmat helmet. Marcus, Brenda, and David had already discarded their helmets and gloves, chancing a disease for the sake of remaining cool. They walked the last few steps toward Marcus and his team before waiving them to a halt.
“Can you put the box down, please?” one man said from within his yellow confines. “I’m with the FBI. We need to figure out what’s going on with this thing before you cart if off.”
“No can do, chief,” Marcus answered. “We’re on orders to come out here, pick this bad boy up, and head back to D.C. If you have an issue with that you�
�re going to have to coordinate it through the Department of Defense.”
“So you’re just going to leave us out here high and dry?” The woman Trish from the CDC was also with the group. “I mean, we don’t have any idea what’s been going on out here. You guys just show up, take the only piece of evidence we have, and leave? This is a little too Roswell for me.”
Roswell. Marcus wondered if anyone had ever used the term Roswell, the supposed home of an alien space ship and the government’s most top-secret alien information, as an adverb. He laughed to himself either way, knowing the woman wouldn’t be satiated until she figured out what the box was all about. He did sympathize with the group. If he had come across a box that made people have horrible hallucinations before he joined the UOD, he would have been creating conspiracy theories on the spot.
Taking the box away from him would have made it worse.
“We’re going to keep in touch with you all, trust us,” Brenda said. “You’re going to get every piece of information on this thing we can manage to scrape up. Until then, be happy that you’re all going to get some sort of commendation for the fact that you were able to get out here and keep the press from swarming all over. This weapon might very well be some new terror tactic that just so happened to wash up on our shores.
“I think it goes without saying that you shouldn’t talk about it with anyone at all.”
“We got the pamphlet at the door,” a man in his mid-thirties said sarcastically. He had a sticker on the outside of his ridiculously large yellow suit that said DHS—Steve. Marcus couldn’t help but laugh again. The fact that they were even wearing those suits after seeing the hallucinations were being created by the box was comical in itself. The huge size of the suits did the rest.
