by Michael Bray
Marcus was certain the bomb threat was a bluff. He had interviews Greg’s girlfriend and she had painted a picture of a man who was far from violent. According to her, he had acted in the heat of the moment. Nevertheless, he had sent men out into the streets, checking litter bins, scouring every alleyway, every parked car for any sign of hidden explosives. All the while, Greg sat in the hall growing more and more afraid and desperate. Marcus had also suspected that as a father himself, Greg wouldn't be able to bring himself to harm any of the children despite the threats he had made. Against the heated objections of local law enforcement and his advisors, Marcus made the decision to send in a team to bring the siege to an end one way or the other. Objections were made. It was suggested that provoking Greg would lead to a bloodbath. But Marcus was sure, confident he had made the right call.
He recalled watching the operation from the very meeting room he was about to go into on the bank of monitors across the back wall showing both TV coverage and the individual video feeds from the helmets of his team as they prepared to make their entry into the school. Marcus felt all eyes on him as he prepared to give the order to go in, knowing that each and every one of them would gladly throw him under the bus if things went wrong in any way. The orders were simple. Take the gunman alive if possible and kill him if they had to. Not Greg. Not a man anymore. Just a thing. An obstacle.
Just a gunman.
As soon as the team breached the school, breaking down the main doors and filing inside, Marcus realised although he trusted his judgement almost unconditionally, in this instance he had been horribly wrong. He could hear the sound of gunfire over the video feeds long before his team were anywhere near the hall. It was then as all eyes in the control room burned into him, Marcus realised he had made a gross misjudgement. The expected compassion he had been so sure Greg would feel towards children who were a similar age as his own son was lost behind fury and desperation at being forced into a situation he saw no way out of. Fear, it seemed had taken away any rational thought process. Backed into a corner, Greg did the only thing he felt able to do, which was to carry out his threat.
He started to fire.
It took the SWAT team six minutes to break into the hall, which was more than long enough. Forty-two of the sixty children were already dead, a further twelve were seriously injured. When he knew the end was near, Greg turned the gun on himself and blasted his brains all over the wall, making sure the six and seven-year-olds who were fortunate enough to survive would have a lifetime of horrific memories which they would never be able to rid themselves of. Vivid images of the carnage as they were fed in real time from the SWAT team's helmet cameras were burned into Marcus's brain, images nobody should ever have to see. They came to him now, as clear six years later as they were the day it happened, each of them driving home the fact that not only had he been wrong, but that he actually had feelings for what he had always seen as the expendable casualties of his operation.
Afterwards, there was a full investigation into what went wrong, but the government knew how valuable an asset Marcus was, and as someone with his natural instinct for making the right call nine times out of ten would go on to be forgiven even if that tenth time was a complete clusterfuck. Even so, Marcus never actually won. Not really. The images of those children took longer to banish into the dark recesses of his brain and needed a good few nights of heavy drinking to help them on their way, but eventually they went with the rest, and he returned to work, slowly feeling his way back onto that bicycle with the wheel that kept on turning no matter if Marcus Atkinson had a hold of the handlebars or not. People, the proverbial ‘they’ who everyone seemed to know, suspected it would be the end for him, that such a monumental mistake would forever affect his ability to do his job. In truth, it made him more determined to prove his methods worked. He still made the tough calls, and even if the guilt of that day was still there, it was his and his alone to manage. His own personal punishment which he would be forced to deal with in his own way, and although he had buried it deep, he had no doubt that from time to time, those ghosts would drift out of the dark to plague him one more time.
He snapped himself to the present, taking a deep breath and pushing aside the horrors of the past in order to concentrate on more pressing matters. He saw one of his senior staff members outside the closed door to the meeting room checking his phone as he paced the corridor. His agitation was clear, as was the look of relief when he saw Marcus approach.
"I'm glad you're here," the flustered man said.
"What's happening in there Mike?"
"I don't know, they won't say anything. They stonewalled me."
"I had the same thing on the phone. They wouldn't tell me anything apart from that I had to be here. Any familiar faces in there?" Marcus said.
"Oh yeah, Josh Harkins is in there, so is Susan Fring."
"From Langley?"
"Yeah. There are a couple of people I don't know too. They seem to be running the show." Mike was nervous and seemed agitated.
"Any heads up on what we're dealing with would be nice."
Mike shrugged. "There's a commander from the Florida National Guard in there called Robbins. He seems to be in the know."
"How the hell did that happen? If we don't know, surely he shouldn't know either."
"Tell me about it. The other two guys running the show in there are strangers to me. They wouldn't even give me their names. Any idea who set this up?"
Marcus shook his head. "No, I mean it's obvious this has come from the top of the chain if that's what you mean."
"Presidential?" Mike whispered, leaning in, his cheap aftershave overpowering.
"Maybe," Marcus said, knowing something coming directly from the President had to be serious.
"Holy shit, they must have some credible intel to pull you in."
"Uh, thanks, I think," Marcus said, flashing his expensive veneers at Mike.
"What I mean is they wouldn't get someone as uh..."
"Emotionless?"
"I was going to say efficient," Mike muttered, "But if you like emotionless better, that works too. My point is they wouldn't get someone who was renowned for fixing problems if they didn't think they had a major problem to fix."
"Good point," Marcus said, his curiosity stirred. "You coming in?"
"Soon," Mike said with an exasperated sigh. "Got a god awful bladder infection. I can't seem to stop pissing. I'll take a leak and be right in."
"Make sure you wash your hands," Marcus said with a wink.
Mike just about managed a semi-amused smile then hurried off the way Marcus had come, change jingling in his pocket as he made for the entrance to the bathroom.
Pausing for a few seconds to enjoy the silence of the corridor, Marcus took a deep breath and went inside the meeting room, curious as to what was so damn important.
II
He had selected the coffin himself, choosing to carry it on his back through the woods to the place where he was to be buried. The others watched in silence as he set it down and looked at them in turn. His brothers. His kin. One of them handed him a shovel. No words were exchanged. None were needed. This had been discussed enough.
The coffin bearer began to dig. The earth was hard, a heavy frost making the top layer hard to penetrate. He was strong, though, and with gritted teeth eased his way to the more compliant, softer ground below. Time passed yet he didn't pause, nor did they stop watching him. When it was done he climbed out of the hole and admired his work. Six feet deep by four feet wide. It would be more than adequate. He handed the shovel back to one of his silent observers, and then looked at each in turn.
"When I return, I shall be a new man," he said, breath fogging in the chilly night air.
They didn't respond, and only watched and waited for what was to come.
The man dragged his coffin to the hole, struggling to position it so it would land upright at the bottom. Again, no help came, just as he had instructed. With a last effort, he slid the co
ffin over the edge of the grave. It landed where he intended, its pale pink lining resembling the tongue of some kind of slumbering beast as it waited for him in the dark.
"Are you ready, Joshua?" the man with the shovel said. Joshua looked down into the hole without fear. He nodded. "When I come back to you, I will be a new man. I will have proved my worth."
"Are you sure you will rise again?" the man with the shovel said, his eyes shining like twin beacons in the gloom.
Joshua clapped him on the shoulder. "I do this to show you my commitment to our cause. I enter the earth as your brother, and I will rise again as the father of the new world."
"When will you be back to us?"
Joshua considered the question, tongue flicking against the back of his teeth as he thought. "When the two of you become twelve in number, dig me out."
"How will they find us? The rest of our kind?"
"You have to believe they will, my brother," Joshua said. He looked at both men in turn and then clambered down into the hole.
"Remember, pack the earth tight," he said as he lay down in the coffin, taking a moment to get comfortable. “Pass down the lid."
The men responded at once, kneeling in the dirt and lowering the lid. Joshua took its weight and paused, staring up at the two men and the slab of sky above him.
"When I return, we give birth to the new world."
"Until then, we will wait for you here." The man with the shovel said.
Joshua nodded and lowered the lid into place. The two men began to fill the hole, neither speaking to the other as they worked into the night. When it was done, they knelt, surrounded by the dense forest.
They waited.
III
The meeting room was dominated by a large oak table. On the back wall, a large TV screen surrounded by smaller monitors allowed presentations or live video feeds to be played as needed. Marcus looked at them, recalling what happened before then forced those ghosts back down into the place he kept them. He took his seat and waited for somebody to fill him in. There was a strange atmosphere in the room, a palpable nervousness which he supposed was directly linked to the increase in threat level. Even so, it was unusual for him to be out of the loop and he was feeling more than a little frustrated. He caught Susan Fring’s eye across the table and was rewarded with a disgusted curl of the lip before she lowered her eyes and pretended to look at her phone.
Bitch.
As Mike had warned him, other than Josh Harding - a nice guy who worked in the White House with the secretary of defence- he didn’t recognise anyone else. A man who looked to be aged anything between fifty and three hundred was standing at the end of the room reviewing a mountain of papers spread out over the desk. He was bald, and his pale skin had an ugly translucent quality giving the observer a sneak preview of the network of blood vessels and veins which lay underneath. His eyes were ringed in bluish purple, showing the distinct signs of a man who was suffering from a lack of sleep, a look enhanced by the white stubble which lined his gaunt cheeks. He reminded Marcus of some kind of zombie - the dead come to life and standing in a cheap suit at the head of the table. Marcus suppressed a small smile at the thought. Only the man's eyes showed any semblance of being alive and stared out from underneath bushy eyebrows like twin brown bottomless wells.
"Thank you all for coming," the man said as he looked at them. Marcus was surprised to hear he had an English accent. "It goes without saying what you are about to hear is extremely sensitive, and should be treated as being on a strictly need to know basis as far as your respective teams are concerned."
The man paused for a second, making sure his point sunk in. "My name is Robert Genaro, and I'm here to tell you about a situation which could have dire repercussions if we don’t contain it and contain it quickly."
"Terrorists?" Marcus asked.
"Nothing so simple I’m afraid," Genaro replied, adding a thin smile which looked positively ghastly in the subdued lighting.
"Since when were terrorists simple?" Marcus fired back.
"If you let me go on, I’ll tell you."
Marcus flushed, feeling both angry and a little put out that this stranger had come into his building, in his meeting room and belittled him. He considered saying something then thought better of it, instead choosing to remain silent until he, at least, found out what was going on. Genaro took his silence as the signal to proceed, and released Marcus from his gaze, glancing back at his vast array of papers on the desk. “In late nineteen ninety-nine, I was working as part of a special projects team commissioned by the government to explore the science of genetics and how they might be applied towards aiding modern warfare. That department still exists today, run in its entirety by me and my team of staff. Our objective was to look into ways of protecting our battlefield infantry from the wears and tears of life in the various war zones scattered across the globe. As you know, the United States is actively supporting and are directly involved on several fronts assisting peacekeeping operations around the world. Unfortunately, this also means we suffer losses. Every soldier who is killed in action represents, at its most basic level, a waste of resources, both time and money spent on training that individual who will never go on to repay that debt.
Marcus wanted to cut in and suggest that, perhaps by giving his life for his country, the soldier had already paid more than enough, but he didn’t want to get kicked out of his own meeting room so he again chose to remain silent as Genaro went on.
“My team were tasked with exploring things which looked more like science fiction than anything we thought truly achievable. We were exploring genetic modification to enhance pain and temperature resistance, cell regeneration and things of a similar nature. Of course, technology at the time was grossly inadequate for such advanced experiments, and we struggled to make any headway. We had grand ideas, of course, just no means to execute them. That all changed in the spring of two thousand and one."
Genaro paused to take a sip of water, looking around the table to make sure he still had their attention. Satisfied, he went on.
"As these things tend to be, it was quite by accident when I stumbled on something which would change the direction of my career and research, and what indirectly brings us all here today. That something was an article in New Scientist magazine written by a man called Richard Draven who was exploring similar technologies to my department but on a much smaller scale. His article claimed he had discovered a new species of monkey in the Congo with amazing regenerative properties. Of course, we know that species today as the tiger monkey, so called for its distinctive yellow markings. At the time of its discovery by Draven, it was thought impossible for a population of creatures to remain undiscovered in a world which we humans wrongly assume holds no secrets to us. The article by Draven was borderline fiction, and he was universally blasted by his colleagues for indulging in such fantasy to the point where it damaged his career. I too scoffed, and yet, some of the things he mentioned rang true with our own research, which piqued my interest. As fantastical and indulgent as it seemed, I decided to seek out Mr. Draven in order to speak to him myself, if for no other reason than to satisfy my own curiosity. After numerous rejections of my requests to speak with him, he finally decided to meet with me, only because he was in London and had some time to kill between appointments."
Genaro paused for another drink of his water, and scanned his audience again, his eyes lingering for just a split second on Marcus.
"I wasn’t sure what to expect from Draven before we met. I think I had half an idea he would be some kind of weirdo, or as you Americans might say a goofball. I was certainly surprised to find upon our meeting that he was a perfectly respectable, intelligent man. He was very humble, very wary of me, especially in light of the way his name had been dragged through the mud by everyone in the scientific community. He had done his research too and knew who I was even if he didn’t know the nature of my work. Within half an hour of speaking to him, I was half convinced he was telling the
truth in his article. By the time another hour had passed, I was absolutely sure and was offering him a place on my team. He, of course, declined. He said he was already worried about the damage the backlash would do to his already tarnished reputation, and didn’t want to further aggravate the situation. He did, however, agree to take us to the location where this specific species of monkey could be found as long as we were willing to fund the trip, as he had spent pretty much all of his funds on his own research. Of course, with the ridicule of the scientific community came the stoppage of grants and funding. I assured him I would raise the funds needed and that he should stand by and be ready to fly out. Sure that my superiors would be thrilled with such a potentially monumental breakthrough, I requested a modest amount of funding to go and retrieve a sample of this particular species of monkey in order to see if we could use it to further our research."
