by Daniel Quinn
Rick slumped behind the low walls of the sound booth. My ears rang from the gunshot in the closed room as the guard ran toward me.
I screamed.
IV
“Dr. Danvers. Close your mouth. A loose tongue spoils the broth.”
I was a trembling wreck. He ran toward me, his gun trained on my head. When he was inches away and I could see his eyes, I knew right then that this was no security guard, this was my letter writer.
“What was that last thing you said?” I stammered.
“I was telling you to be quiet. A loose tongue and all.”
The burned gun powder wafted from the muzzle. While I was trembling like a leaf, he seemed to be utterly calm. He held the gun perfectly still.
“My, Dr. Danvers, you’re sweating like a bullet. Get it? Bullet?” He cackled.
“Please, I need to check on my colleague.”
“He’ll be fine. I hit him in the shoulder. I think. We’ll go check on him in a minute, but we need to go lock that door. I’m sure we’ll be surrounded any moment now.”
I swallowed and pushed the fear down as best I could. “You’re right. There is security all over this building. You’ll never get away with this.”
He grabbed me by the shoulder while keeping the gun trained on me with his other hand. He marched me toward the door that he had come through and dead-bolted it. We turned and secured the main door that Rick and I had used. Then, on to the opposite side. He looked around for any other entrances. Satisfied that the room was secure, he walked me over to the sound booth.
Rick’s shoes stuck out from the back of the booth.
“Oh my God, Rick!” I dropped down next to him and my knee instantly got soaked. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. “Rick, can you hear me?”
Rick’s eyelids flickered, but didn’t open. He had a nasty gash in his left shoulder that looked raw and angry. Blood seeped from under him. The assailant had hit him in the shoulder, but a little lower than I had hoped. He must have hit the top of the lung. I tried my best to stay calm as I assessed the situation.
“He needs help. We have to call someone,” I yelled.
My captor stood over us. “There’s not really time for all that. It won’t matter in a few minutes anyway.”
My blood ran cold as he opened up his jacket and showed me that he was strapped with what looked to be explosives.
~*~
“Oh my god. What are you doing?” I shouted. “You can’t do this. This man needs help!”
He reached down and pulled at my arm.
I pulled away. “No! I have to stop this bleeding.” I looked around for anything. There was a roll of paper towels on the counter of the sound booth. I unspooled a big handful and dabbed at the wound. I had no idea how to stop the bleeding, or even if I could, but I felt like I needed to do something. Anything. I felt the assailant fidgeting next to me.
“Alright, Dr. Danvers, come with me. He’s gonna be okay. Or he won’t. Yeah, he probably won’t. I need you over here. We’re gonna make a statement.”
He pulled me by the arm again, but he held strong this time. He lifted me to my feet. Blood covered my legs and hands. The gravity of the situation hit me all of a sudden and my knees went weak.
“No, ma’am. You don’t get to pass out on me. No, ma’am. You’re gonna be right here with me.”
“Police department. You’re surrounded. Open the door.” An officer with a bullhorn blared through the door just outside the main entrance.
The man checked his watch. “Two and a half minutes. They’re a little faster than I gave them credit for.”
“A gunshot was reported. We need to make sure everything is okay in there.” The bullhorn shouted again.
The gun dug into my back. “Tell them that you are here and that you are okay.”
He pushed me toward the door with the gun in my back.
“Hello, this is Dr. Alexandra Danvers. I am in here, and I am fine. But my associate Richard Sloan is injured. He’s been shot.” The gun dug deeper into my back.
“Careful, doc,” he hissed in my ear. “I don’t want to give everything away just yet.”
This time the police officer spoke, but not with the aid of the bullhorn. “Dr. Danvers, are you alone?”
“Like I said, Dr. Sloan is here with me…”
“But the gunshot. What happened?”
I hesitated. I didn’t know how to answer. This man wanted something, attention maybe, but he still had not stated his reason.
“Dr. Danvers, we know you’re not alone in there. Are you in immediate danger?”
The skin around my spine pinched as the gun twisted and prodded with his every move. I whispered to him. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell them that I will make my demands soon.”
“Who do I tell them you are?”
He pulled me back away from the door. We heard an increased commotion, like more people were gathered outside.
My captor called out. “Not so fast, officer. I have a hostage, and one is injured. No funny moves or I blow this entire place to bits.”
“Sir, tell us what you want.” The officer called out.
“Don’t you want to know who I am first?”
“Sir, we have already identified you as Walter Johanson. White male, fifty-three years of age. Single. You live with your mother at 1793 Orchard Springs Drive. What is it that you want?”
He looked at me, puzzled.
I pointed to the square above the door. He leaned in and squinted.
“New security cameras and security system with the best facial recognition. The kind of work we do draws all sorts of protesters.”
Mr. Johanson had not taken this bit of information into account. For the first time, I saw him tremble.
V
The uncomfortable silence was pierced by the sound of my phone ringing. Johanson flicked the gun up, motioning for me to pull the phone out. The screen had a photo of Eric and his name.
“I’ll bet he’s seen the news,” Johanson said.
My stomach was in knots. I was terrified to think about him worrying.
“Go ahead, answer it.”
“Eric! I’m okay,” I answered at the same time he blurted out, “Lex, honey, are you okay?”
“I am.”
“I saw the news. What’s going on?”
“I can’t really talk, but I’m okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“Lex, tell me what’s going on.”
“I can’t talk, but I would really appreciate it if you would pray for me right now.”
He paused. I’d never asked him to pray for me before. He knew where I stood on that stuff. He was the believer, not me. “I am already. Hang in there, sweetie.”
Before I could say anything else, Johanson snatched the phone away from me. He put it to his ear. “Mr. Danvers. I think if you would have been praying for your wife before now we wouldn’t be in this mess. Say goodbye.” He hung up the phone.
A cry escaped as I clutched my mouth. He tossed the phone back to me.
“Interesting husband you have there. Maybe if he would have kept you in line we wouldn’t be having to do this. Maybe his next wife will be better for him. We could stand here and talk until the cows turn blue, but there is a purpose to my little visit. I need you to show me the information you have that you were planning to show at your press conference.”
I was trembling with rage. “Don’t you dare talk to me about my husband.”
“Hit a nerve, did I? You better get yourself in line, missy.”
“Or what? You’re going to shoot me like you did Rick? That man is dying over there. You have to stop this and let me get help for him.”
“It doesn’t matter. Look at me. I’m wearing enough explosives to level this entire city block. I shot him because I didn’t plan for him. You, yes. But he startled me. He’s gonna die regardless. We all are.”
~*~
I pulled away from him. “What do you wa
nt?”
“Don’t get any bright ideas,” he said through gritted teeth.
“You won’t shoot me. I mean, we’re all going to die anyway, right? Tell me. What do you want?”
“I want to shut this whole charade down. I won’t allow you to crush people’s faith.”
“Why would the truth crush people’s faith? Don’t you want to know the truth? We came from somewhere. We have proof.”
His face turned red and he shook as he gripped the gun tighter and spit. “You say you have the answers, but what you have is a fabricated lie. You’re trying to replace what people have put their trust in with some other story, a story that makes you feel better about the world. But in doing that, you’re changing the shape of the world. You’re asking the world to swallow your new story, but I wouldn’t eat that with a ten-foot pole.”
“You think that because I found my story I’m not a person of faith? Exactly the opposite. Finding the truth made my faith stronger. Or I should say it gave me faith for the first time.”
“You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to twist everything. I know what you stand for. Or better yet, I know that you don’t stand for anything.”
“That’s not true at all. I just want to be able to prove what I believe.”
“That goes against everything. If you have to prove it, then it’s not faith. There has to be an element of mystery to faith.”
“What if I told you that I do believe in things that I can’t explain? What if I told you that that’s what made me a believer?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I talk with angels.”
“Don’t patronize me. Don’t you even.” He waved his finger in my face. “I want you to say it. I want you to admit it. You’re gonna die anyway, you might as well go out with a clear conscience.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“I want you to tell the truth!”
“You want the truth? I’ll give you the truth.”
The Police officer called out through the door again. “Is everything okay in there? I need to hear that the hostages are unharmed, or we’ll have to come in by force. We don’t want to do that.”
I looked at him, dodging my head around his upheld pistol. “Let me tell them I’m not hurt.”
He waved the gun toward the door. “I’m watching you.”
I walked toward the door. “This is Dr. Alexandra Danvers. I am unharmed, but my colleague is seriously injured. I’ve stopped the bleeding, for now, but he needs medical attention.”
“Dr. Danvers,” the police officer answered, “do you need us to come in?”
“Not yet. I think I’ll be out soon. I think this is just a big misunderstanding.”
“Get back over here,” the gunman said. “You talked to them, now finish what you were saying and let’s get this over with.”
“Like I was saying, the truth is probably more complicated than you think.”
VI
“It all began with the discoveries of the last century. Scientists started discovering artifact after artifact that couldn’t be dated properly. It was like we had no frame of reference to properly catalog these things. Certain elements that didn’t seem to be native to our world, covered in writings and symbols that didn’t mean anything, but looked to be in some sort of logical progression. Like a language.
“At first all of these things were just oddities and not taken seriously by academics. They wouldn’t even entertain the idea. I was one of those.
“But then I started having dreams. Sometimes I would have these visions even when I was awake. It was crazy at first, there was a woman that looked like me, and she would tell me weird things. Things like you would see on some of these cable TV shows. She told me that everything I thought was true about life was wrong. She told me that there is more to life than I could possibly imagine.
“She talked to me for months before I let my guard down. A little at a time, I began to understand what she was saying. She told me her name was Eve and she was the mother of our civilization. Great scientists used her DNA to make copies of the building blocks of life and sent it here. She and a man named Adam—I know how this sounds—seeded life on our planet. According to her, our world is a great big experiment, an experiment in creating life and seeing just how civilizations would form. The funny thing is that we are still connected with our creators if we would only allow ourselves to see into our subconscious. There is more to life than we can imagine.”
“See, this is what you people do,” he seethed. “You take the truth and you twist it so that you can control and manipulate people. You’re mocking me and what I believe.”
“No, sir. I would never do that. Even if I disagree with you, I would never mock you. Life is too precious. You know what else Eve told me? She told me that we are not the only world that was seeded. There are hundreds more out there just like us. We are not alone. That is what’s so wonderful about this discovery. We can finally say there is other life out there, and yes, we can say that there is more to us than mere chance. We all get to be right.”
I smiled. A deep, satisfied smile. I really thought I had gotten through to him. I really thought he would lay down his weapon and go home. I believed that until he detonated the bomb.
~*~
“Eric Danvers?”
“This is he.”
“Mr. Danvers…”
“I know. I’ve been watching the news.”
“We’re very sorry, Mr. Danvers. If there is anything we can do, please let us know. We’ll need you to come down to the station later and give a statement, but take your time. We understand the grief you must feel at your loss.”
“Thank you, officer.” Eric hung up the phone.
He leaned back in his recliner, eyes glued to the TV. He was upset, shaken, devastated. But not without hope. Oddly, all of the conversations he’d had with Lexi over the last several months had prepared him for this.
He closed his eyes and thought of her. He concentrated on holding his memory strong. Her dark hair, her full lips, her large brown eyes. He could almost hear her voice. He drifted in that sea of calm as the television in front of him buzzed with the sounds of reporters and emergency responders and calls for justice and action. But he didn’t care. Lexi was there with him.
After a while, he went to the roll top desk where Lexi sometimes worked at home. He pulled out a folder where she kept some backup photocopies of the material she had been working on. He flipped through the sheets of paper until he found the one with the mysterious symbol. The symbol that was found on the mechanism that Lexi determined was used to bring Eve’s genetic material to our world. He ran his fingers over the four large symbols and thought of Lexi. His fingers traced them one by one.
N. A. S. A.
“I’ll be with you soon.”
~*~
A Word from Hank Garner
Hank Garner is the author of Bloom, Mulligan, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and Writer’s Block. For nearly two years, Hank has hosted The Author Stories Podcast, a weekly show focusing on writing and the creative process.
Hank lives in Mississippi with his wife and five children.
Follow his releases and the Author Stories Podcast at hankgarner.com.
~*~
Black Site
Michael Patrick Hicks
~*~
I
Skin sloughed away from the subject, dissolving in the synthesis chamber. Watching the pink tissue drift through the solution, Alpha was reminded of fish food flakes. He’d never had a fish tank, but Papa had. Because he carried the memories of Papa in his own skull, he was able to make the comparison by proxy.
“Subject Uniform failed to maintain cohesion,” he said for the benefit of the record. His voice was dispassionate and wooden, no longer burdened by the personal sense of failure he had once felt during earlier projects. The lack of success, though, was not necessarily a failure. Rather, it carried the potential of a lesson, new data to s
tudy and build from.
Echo stood beside him, her hands hanging limply at her sides. Her fingers fidgeted against her thighs, patting out a tiny rhythm against her slate gray slacks, occasionally pinching at the fabric. As far as Alpha could tell, none of the others, himself included, exhibited such nervous habits. Not for the first time, he thought Echo was simply unique, and not just because she was the only female of the project. That, in and of itself, had been an aberration. A fluke. An oddity that he enjoyed studying, frankly.
“Victor appears to be gestating regularly,” she said. “Systems are normal.”
Even Victor, though, was marred by irregularities, far more than Uniform had been. Yet Echo was correct—Victor, for all intents and purposes, was developing as planned, even if the term ‘regular’ was a bit of a misnomer. The project was on track, and that was the most important aspect. The loss of Uniform was a disappointment, but hardly more than a minor misstep in Papa’s grander designs.
Drawing closer to the chamber, he studied the developing fetus. The only thing separating the viability of Uniform and Victor were slight alterations in protein sequences. A slight change in carboxyl groups, an alteration in an amino acid that made one’s protein either active or inactive, turned a hormone on or off and, in turn, meant either doom or survival for one’s genetic sample.
Victor was nearing the equivalent of its fifth month of development. In a normal fetus at this stage, the cellular formation would have taken on a shape plainly recognizable as human. Yet, Alpha failed to recognize much that was uniquely human in Victor’s development. A clearly designed face, arms, legs, and torso were all plainly familiar in terms of categorization but far from human. In fact, the aberrations were so pronounced that studying the subject gave him a mild headache.
Echo put her arm around his waist, rested her head on his shoulder. He pressed his cheek against her hair, enjoying the warmth radiating from her body.
