The Collective Protocol

by Brian Parker

  The hallway opened into the lobby and Reagan searched for William and her father. She saw them both sitting on the couch where she’d been typing earlier and skidded to a halt. “What… What’s happening?” she asked.

  Her father looked at her and said, “Oh, we’re just waiting for you. William was just telling me about your first date. Sounds lovely, dear.”

  Reagan’s defenses shot up. Besides the obvious fact that her father was sitting with an attempted rapist, he never called her “dear.”

  “Dad, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. Why don’t you come over here and sit down with us?”

  “No way,” she shook her head. “This is all wrong.”

  “Reagan, we just wanted you here to see the big event,” William stated evenly. “Are you sure that you don’t want to come closer to get a better view?”

  Her eyes darted from her father’s face to William’s. “Better view of what?”

  “The main event!” William said and stood up. He clapped his hands and danced around like a madman. “This is going to be so exciting!”

  Reagan took a few hesitant steps forward. Her father just sat there staring at her while the youth gesticulated wildly a couple of feet from him. She knew that she wouldn’t like the answer, but she had to ask. “What’s the main event?”

  William stopped dancing and looked towards her. His eyes blazed with a fire that she hadn’t noticed before. “You’ve always had the perfect little family. What kind of sick bastards only adopt one twin? They took you from me and gave you the world.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked guardedly. “What do you mean ‘twin’?”

  “Oh, this is perfect! You didn’t even know that you were a twin. You have an identical twin sister, isn’t that right, Garrett?”

  “Yes, Reagan is a twin. We couldn’t take both of them at the time. We thought that Heather wasn’t able to have children so we adopted.”

  Her mind flashed to the police station holding room all those months ago when the FBI agent asked her what she was doing in Canada the previous week. It must have been her twin sister. Why was she in Canada?

  “Wait. Are you saying that I’m adopted?”

  “Yes,” her father answered in anguish. “We learned about your mother and decided to keep it from you.”

  Reagan’s perception of reality came crashing down around her and she could feel a tempest of anger rising inside of her. How dare they keep such a critical part of her past—two parts!—from her. She was an adult now; at the very least they should have told her when she turned eighteen.

  A single tear fell down her father’s cheek and William rushed over to wipe it from his face. “What the hell?” he muttered and turned to Reagan. “You’re doing this! I’m losing control of him.”

  Reagan blinked several times to clear her thoughts and said, “What are you talking about, William?” She was confused about what was happening. Why was her father sitting here with this man? Were her parents ever going to tell her that she had a twin sister?

  “You’re developing later than I did,” William said staring at her in what she would describe as awe. “I can feel it in you… That’s why I couldn’t find you!”

  “William, please just go away. I promise I won’t call the police. Just leave us alone and we’ll go our separate ways.”

  “Things have moved beyond that,” William said sadly. “I’ve done things that no one would ever forgive me for.” He turned his body back towards her father and hung his head.

  “Why didn’t you take me too?” he whispered.

  Reagan asked, “What? What do you mean, William?”

  He looked back at her and his face contorted in rage. “You think you’re so special!” he screamed. His hand whipped out lightning fast and embedded the blade of a knife in her father’s chest. Before Reagan could react, he’d pulled it out and stabbed it back into Garrett’s gut.

  “No!” Reagan screamed. The world seemed to shift around her and in William’s place she saw herself staring back in astonishment. Reagan realized that the woman must be her twin sister. However, the girl in front of her was blonde and much thinner than her; she looked sickly and unhealthy, borderline anorexic.

  Reagan backed up in shock and the vision shifted back to her father and William. Garrett sat staring blankly at the blood spreading across his chest and stomach while his murderer advanced towards her with the knife in his hand.

  “Leave me alone!” Reagan screamed.

  This time she saw the air around her ripple towards the man and he changed from William back to the girl. When the ripples of air hit him, he saw the image separate from William and the aura rocketed skyward. William’s body collapsed and fell forward onto the coffee table.

  The atmosphere in the lobby seemed to clear, as if a haze had been lifted. She saw movement out of the corner of her eye and the receptionist walked from the back of the office to her normal place at the desk.

  “Call 9-1-1!” Reagan screamed at the woman. Before she could recover from the shock of the punk girl from the 5th floor yelling at her, the two security guards burst through the front doors with their weapons drawn.

  EIGHTEEN

  The three Lockhart women buried Garrett on Christmas Eve. Helping her mother pick out the casket and headstone was almost the hardest thing that Reagan had ever had to do, second only to holding her father’s head in her lap as he died.

  Despite William’s assurances that the police wouldn’t come, they’d arrived at the hotel quickly and arrested the unconscious murderer. The last Reagan heard, he was still in a coma and the doctors weren’t sure if he’d come out of it.

  Detective Simms reappeared in her life once more for the investigation. His attitude towards her had changed dramatically since she had initially been a person of interest in the first case and he actually sympathized with her as one of those people that bad things seemed to happen to without their control. After viewing the hotel’s security camera footage Reagan was cleared of any wrongdoing in the case by the MPDC. The footage clearly showed William hunting her down and then killing her father in front of her.

  One of the unanswered questions in the case was what happened to the hotel employees and guests during the incident. The cameras showed Reagan sitting on the lobby furniture typing on her computer in a relatively busy hotel lobby up until about three minutes before William appeared. Then the guests went to their rooms, the hotel staff disappeared into back rooms and the security guards stood out front in the foul weather, turning potential visitors away.

  Just as in hundreds of police investigations all over the country since October, things didn’t add up. When asked, not a single employee or guest could account for how they got from where they were before the incident to where they ended up when the cameras went fuzzy from some type of massive power surge right after Garrett Lockhart’s murder. Every one of them had a gap in their memory and it appeared that they’d all suffered some type of temporary memory loss at the exact same time.

  Reagan struggled to come to grips with her father’s death, but couldn’t shake the feeling that she was somehow responsible for it. Her mother refused to sleep in her suite and the three of them shared the two queen-sized beds in the girls’ room. The family didn’t bother to open their Christmas presents the next day and Reagan wrote a heartfelt blog post about the incident that instantly went viral and had more than four million views before her website was mysteriously shut down.

  There were no emails telling her what type of internet protocol that she’d supposedly violated with her blog content or anything like that; it simply disappeared from the web. When she tried to log into her account, her blog had been deactivated and the domain name was available for sale. Her blog held more than five years’ worth of research, memories, thoughts and plans for the future. She would have been devastated if she hadn’t made a habit early on about writing everything first and then posting it to her site. It was annoying that all the wo
rk she’d put into the blog was gone, but at least she had the contents saved on her computer.

  In addition to the death of her father and the loss of her webpage to an unknown source, Reagan was coming down with some type of illness. Since her father died she’d been suffering from migraines and consistently had a low-grade fever that spiked in the night when she slept. It typically jumped to around 104 degrees within hours of her going to bed. Her body was so exhausted from the lack of deep REM sleep that she walked around in a daze for several days.

  Then it suddenly stopped. Whatever her body had been fighting off disappeared and she was fine. Everything with her body went back to normal while the United States continued the downward spiral towards anarchy. No more mass casualty-producing events had happened in a couple of weeks, but the aftereffects still continued to rock the nation as criminals battled for supremacy with the police, placing normal citizens in the dangerous middle ground between them.

  New Year’s Eve was in two days and Reagan had finally regained her health enough to hold down more than soup and crackers. Her first meal was a plate full of bland steamed vegetables and some rice while her mother and sister enjoyed a shared Thai meal at Ansley’s favorite restaurant. Besides the luncheon after Garrett’s funeral it was the first time that they’d eaten away from the hotel.

  Reagan watched wistfully as the others ate their meal. While Thai was her sister’s favorite, she certainly enjoyed it and wished that her stomach felt well enough to give a few bites a try. Her mother hadn’t talked at all during dinner and Reagan was concerned.

  “Are you doing okay, Mom?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah. Sorry,” the older Lockhart answered. “I was just thinking. So much has changed.”

  “We still have each other,” Reagan affirmed. After a second she added softly, “And I’d do anything to protect you.”

  Heather Lockhart looked strangely at her daughter and said, “I know you would, honey. Why would you say that though?”

  She stared at her glass of water and muttered, “I was too weak to help Dad. I felt that something about the situation had already spun out of control and I let that man kill him.”

  Her mother reached across the table and grasped her hands. “You couldn’t have done anything to stop that madman. If you’d have tried, you would have been hurt too. Please promise me that you won’t do anything to seek some type of revenge. You’ll only end up getting in trouble with the police if you do something to him. He’s in a coma for Christ’s sake.”

  Reagan’s eyes snapped up and stared at her mother’s. “I wasn’t talking about doing something to William. I mean, I’ll protect you from here on out.”

  The older woman squeezed her hands. “We’re safe, honey. Don’t worry.”

  “Nowhere is safe anymore,” Reagan countered.

  “That reminds me, girls. I’ve decided to move back home.”

  “Eww, Mom! The house still smells like skunks,” Ansley whined.

  “Mom, we’re fine in the hotel for now…” she said. “Is it the insurance company? Are they telling us that we have to leave?”

  “No, no. I just want to be back home with your father’s things. You two can stay in the hotel if you’d like.”

  “No way. I go where you go,” Reagan replied.

  Ansley threw up her hands in disgust and said, “Ugh, I guess we’re moving back to Stankville.”

  “The smell has been cut down considerably,” Heather stated. “I stopped by yesterday for a few things and the remediation crew was there spraying some type of liquid odor neutralizer on everything. I wasn’t there for the final results, but I bet that the place is even better than it was yesterday.”

  “Okay, then it’s settled. We’re moving back home,” Reagan said with a reassuring smile.

  After a few seconds, Reagan forged ahead with a question that had been burning in her for over a week. “Mom, right before… Before Dad died, he told me something and I want to ask you about it.”

  “Of course, what is it?”

  She glanced at her sister and knew that the next statement would likely change everything between the two of them. It was important and she needed to know the truth. “William said that I was adopted and Dad said that it was true. Is it? Am I adopted?”

  Her mother went extremely still and then sighed before she answered quietly, “Yes, honey. You’re adopted. We wanted to tell you as you grew older, but the timing was never right. When you were thirteen, you had the hardest time with making friends and the whole Goth thing that you were into. We were worried about what would happen if we told you. We agreed to tell you when you turned sixteen, but you had that automobile accident and spent two months in the hospital. Then we decided to tell you when you graduated from high school, but you were devastated when you didn’t get into Yale, so we held off again. Time just sort of slipped away and we didn’t think it was that important anymore.”

  Reagan swallowed the lump in her throat. She knew her parents well enough to determine that what her mother had just told her was the truth. They would never have tried to pile any more adversity on her and she’d had a rough time of it during her teenage years when she figured most people are told that they’re adopted. She accepted that without much thought; they’d been acting in her best interest. However, there were two parts of the story that she needed to know.

  “Thank you for protecting me. I think you probably made the right decision. No time was right to tell me without hurting me. There are two things that he also said that I need to know about.”

  “How did William know about your adoption?” her mother asked as Ansley stared wide-eyed at the young woman across the table that she’d always thought was her full sister.

  “I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that and I have no idea…” she trailed off as she imagined the sickly-looking version of herself superimposed over William’s body. “Dad said that you guys learned something horrible about my… my birth mother. What was that?”

  “We learned early on that she was a cruel and spiteful woman who wanted absolutely nothing to do with us—or with you. We went through the adoption agency to contact her when we first learned that you were a hemophiliac when you were six. Since it can be genetic, we needed to find out if anyone in her family had the disease so the doctors could properly diagnose and treat it.”

  Reagan fingered the red medical alert bracelet that had been with her in one form or another for almost her entire life. It made sense to her now why the doctors had been so baffled at first. It was because no one in Heather or Garrett Lockhart’s family had the disease.

  Okay, two of the burning questions are down, only one more. “Mom… I know this has been a big day for revelations, but… Do I have a twin sister?”

  Ansley fell out of her chair and landed hard on her rump. “What is this, some type of daytime soap opera?” she asked from under the table.

  “Ansley, get up here! You’re embarrassing us,” her mother chastised.

  When the thirteen year-old pulled herself back up to the table Heather once again grasped Reagan’s wrists. “No more secrets. Yes, you had a twin sister. We adopted you when you were one month old. We’d actually drawn up the paperwork to adopt both of you, but when we got to New York and saw her condition, we decided against it. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

  “Your twin sister, Paige, was very sick,” her mother continued with red-rimmed eyes. “The doctors in the hospital said that she’d been in the NICU since birth and they were surprised that she’d held on as long as she had. In the week that we were there getting the paperwork and payment arranged with the agency she had two full seizures and had flat-lined once. We couldn’t afford to take on the medical care that she needed and we were convinced that she’d die within a few weeks of adoption.”

  “What happened to her?” Reagan asked.

  “She survived and eventually made it out of the NICU, but before we could get the paperwork together to adopt her she disappeared in
to the foster care pipeline. You’ve got to remember that record-keeping was very different back then and at the time it was next to impossible to grant a by-name request for adoption. People do it all the time now, what with the popularity of surrogacy and everything, but it just didn’t happen almost twenty years ago.”

  “Have you ever tried doing an internet search for her? You know, type in ‘Paige’… What’s her—my—birth mother’s last name?”

  “It’s Greene. And yes, of course I’ve tried to find her. Do you know how much guilt and regret can build up over that long of a period of time? Your father and I even hired a detective to find her, but we never learned anything.”

  “She lives in Canada,” Reagan said bluntly.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “When I spoke to the FBI, they asked me what I’d been doing in Canada and showed me a picture of a girl who was a spitting image of me, except that she was a lot thinner than I am.”

  Her mother clucked her tongue on the roof of her mouth annoyingly like she always did when she was deep in thought. “That might make sense. We never had the detective look beyond the United States since she was a U.S. citizen. The part about her being really thin might also be an indicator that it’s really her since she was sickly as an infant. It probably carried on into adulthood.”

  Reagan pushed the rice idly around her plate and then sat back heavily in the restaurant booth. “I’m glad that I know,” she said with crossed arms.

  Her mother regarded her for a moment and said, “You’re body language is telling me something different. Are you sure that you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m alright. I’m just thinking. I want you to know that this doesn’t change things.”

  “You’re damn right it doesn’t. You’re my daughter.” Reagan’s mother rarely cursed, so the use of a curse word, even a mild one, showed the conviction that she felt.