Emergence (48 page)

Three hours I sat there. Three hours staring at anything but the Bieber Direction. Finally, I heard a
click
that signaled a lock turning. I got up, moving to stand near the door so I could catch whoever it was unaware.

I waited a minute. Nothing happened.

“Mister Stoner, please stand away from the door.”
A voice rang through the room, generic and loud. Hidden speaker. Judging by the comment there was a hidden camera, too. No use looking around for it, as it could be anywhere. I stepped back until the bed touched the back of my legs.

“Thank you.”

The door opened and two men stepped through, briskly stepping to either side of the door. One black, the other Hispanic, both soldiers, judging by their bearing and state of alertness. If it’s one thing I knew after fourteen years in the military, it was soldiers. Each carried a cattle-prod. The electric type. Not something I enjoyed being hit with, and before you ask, yes, I have been hit with those before.

“Please step out the door, turn to your right, and walk to the end of the corridor,”
the voice said.
“There, you will find a blue door. Enter it.”

I had nothing to gather, so I stepped forward, between Dumb and Dumber, and turned to the right. A long, white corridor, lit with fluorescent tubes that extended all the way along the centre of the ceiling, led to, you guessed it, a blue door. There were a few other doors, all different colors, but I kept going to the blue, as directed. I stopped, grabbed the handle, looked behind to where Dumb and Dumber were following me, and twisted the handle.

I walked into a large room with one window that was curtained off, dominated by a round conference table, where a small man sat. He reminded me a little of Niles Crane from that show
Frasier
. Thin more than slim, a pinched face. Balding blond hair so pale it was almost white. Hands steepled together. Just sitting there, looking at me with pale blue eyes, saying nothing.

I moved over to the table. Sat down opposite him. Said nothing, just looked. Not at him, but everywhere else. There was really nothing to look at, but I managed to avoid his eyes for what seemed a full five minutes. I glanced up to see him still staring at me, just sitting there. Looking at me. Guess I’d have to make the first move.

“So you’re a Bieber fan? A
Belieber
?”

“Are you always such a smartass?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Pretty much.”

“We all need a coping mechanism.” He turned away, pulled a remote from his jacket, and pressed a button. A smooth
whirr
filled the room as a screen slid down from the ceiling. “My name’s Mister White. I represent a group that knows the truth about the world we live in.”

“
The Truth?
” I deliberately gave inflection to the words to suggest a proper noun. I grammar like that.

“Yes,” White said. “The truth about the world we live in. Watch.”

With another button push, the lights dimmed and the screen lit up. I found myself watching things. Terrible things. I thought it was a horror film, one of those ‘found footage’ pieces of crap that are everywhere today due to the low production cost for potential high return.

After a few seconds of white noise and static, what looked like a warehouse sprang into view. I recognized the viewpoint as a helmet cam, like one of those Go-Pro things. The feed was color.

The place looked like your normal industrial-area warehouse; blank concrete walls, cheap metal roof, pipes down the outside of the building to defray costs as much as possible. The only windows were high up, to make it harder to break into. A normal warehouse. Nothing to distinguish it from a thousand others in any city in the country. I saw the point-of-view moving as the guy who wore the cam looked around at other guys wearing black tactical gear with no markings or ranks visible. Not SWAT, that’s for sure. SWAT are covered in insignia, with their acronym on the back of everything. These guys looked like Special Forces, some black op group with little to no government oversight. The rifles they held strengthened that idea: HK416A5 assault rifles with full rail targeting and laser-pointer systems. Weren’t normal for anyone that didn’t have a damn good budget and access to the best weapons around. The short-stroke gas piston system, unique to Heckler and Koch, removed most of the problems of the M16 and M4 rifles that were once the backbone of infantrymen and Special Forces everywhere. Nice rifles used by very serious groups, always military or law enforcement, and the ones I saw weren’t the civilian version, either.

The camera moved forward as the men received some signal to breach the warehouse. There was no sound. I saw the way they stacked near the doors though, waiting for the guy with a breaching charge on the end of broomstick. Low tech, and used a thousand times by the military community in every war the last thirty years.

I saw the puff of smoke and dust as the charges blasted the door locks. The stacked teams went through the doors into the warehouse. The view switched to a pale, washed-out green as the camera switched to light-enhancement night vision, and saw the men do the same, pulling down state-of-the-art Quad-Eye panoramic night vision goggles (PNVGs) that had been strapped on their helmets. These things were some of the best NVG tech I’d seen. I’d heard rumors of newer stuff, but if they were true, it hadn’t hit the market or the military yet. I had friends enough in the know to keep me up-to-date with all this shit.

I watched the screen, seeing the stacks of pallets that filled the warehouse, making it hard to see anything or anyone that might be lying in wait for the attackers. These guys had a hard job. Nothing worse than a warehouse full of pallets for potential bad guys to hide in. They could be anywhere.

I watched the men spread out, using a mixture of hand signals and a radio command channel that I couldn’t hear. The guy who wore the camera was behind two others, and both of them suddenly disappeared; they didn’t move out of sight, they just disappeared. One minute there, the next, gone.

The vision froze for a second, and then rewound. I looked over at White. He was holding the remote control. I looked back at the screen as it moved forward, a lot slower than before. I watched closely and this time I saw what happened. Both men were grabbed and dragged upward so fast it confused the eye at normal speed. White rewound it once more, and I watched again. Again they were hauled up, but the strangest thing was, there was no sign of anyone grabbing them. It was as though they were taken by invisible aliens. It reminded me of a tacky Hong Kong martial arts film with wire-work ninjas.

White left it playing this time, ramped back up to normal speed. I watched the panic as the team reformed. I watched as more and more of them disappeared up into the unknown. Eventually, the remaining six—I think there were fourteen in the original assault group—worked out what was happening and started aiming their H&Ks upward. I got a full view of something I never would have believed yesterday, but after this morning’s little fracas I’d believe just about anything. If I’d seen an alien hovering over them in a mini Marvin the Martian flying saucer, I wouldn’t have doubted for a second. What I saw now, on that screen, was unbelievable, yet just as compellingly-believable.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t human, but some kind of fucking gargoyle/dragon hybrid thing. Pure white body like a marble statue, with smooth tight scales and glowing white eyes. It was like something straight out of a
Dungeons & Dragons
manual, only goddamn real. Too fucking much, for any other day. Today, I just wanted some popcorn to munch on while I slowly lost my mind. I prayed it was all special effects, yet deep down I knew it wasn’t. This whole scene was too complex to be a practical joke. No-one I knew was rich or twisted enough to pull this off.

Goddamn
. I hate chimerics.

On the video, the guys were shitting themselves, screaming in abject terror, opening up with their assault rifles, seemingly to no effect. Bullets bounced off the pale body as though it were made of stone. It leered down at the soldiers, flashing dagger-like teeth. Then it spread wings that had been folded up against its back.

I watched the rest of the slaughter in more silence. The viewpoint changed as men died, obviously switching between soldiers. White hadn’t said a word, either, but I heard his breathing deepen a little as he watched the deaths of what I assumed were his men. The last I saw, the blood had spread so thickly over the lens of one helmet-cam that it was nearly impossible to see anything.

Finally, the screen went dark.

“Thoughts?” asked White, his voice displaying no sign of any upset at what we had watched.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s so fucked up that I can’t even say how fucked up it is. The government’s been telling folks chimerics are under control. All registered and catalogued and exhaustively interviewed by trained personnel. Looking at this, I’d tend to disagree. That thing is chimeric, right?”

“Sort of,” he answered.

“What do you mean ‘sort of’? Either you’re normal or chimeric. There’s no ‘sort of,’ far as I know.”

“Most of those who’ve manifested in recent decades have been law-abiding for the most part. Then there are…
the monsters
.”

“Monsters?”

White nodded at the now-darkened screen. “What else would you call it?”

“Fair enough. I’ve seen some strange ones, sure.”

He stood up and walked over to tap on the door. It opened to reveal Dumb and Dumber still standing there. “Some refreshments, please,” said White. “We may be here for some time. Mister Stoner hasn’t tried to escape or hit me yet, so he may be a keeper.”

Dumber nodded and walked out of view.

“I can hear you, you know,” I said, “and there’s still time for me to crack your skull.” At that, Dumb glared at me for a second before White shut the door on him. I wasn’t intimidated. I could take out White and those two goons without breaking a sweat.

“I know you can hear me,” said White. “I just wanted you to know that the last three guys who’ve sat in that chair have lost it well before this point of the conversation.”

“And…?” I said. “Did they? Leave?”

“Let’s just say they’re not here,” White said.

“You don’t have to appear so broken up about it.”

White laughed. “No-one’s going to miss you, either. Oh, I know about your past, your little community of Special Forces buddies, but one word from me and they’ll forget you ever existed.”

That statement actually worried me a little. I’d gone to great lengths to hide who I used to be. I thought I’d done okay, by anyone’s standards, but obviously these guys had a long reach.

“The thing is,” continued White, “the world’s a very different place to what you thought it was. It’s our job to make sure that stays on a need-to-know basis.” He paused as the door opened and Dumber came in, pushing a trolley that held covered plates and a percolator filled with what looked like rich, black coffee.

Good
. I sure as hell needed a caffeine fix. I might prefer flat whites, but at this stage, after the morning I’d had, I’d suck year-old coffee powder through a leper’s sock and still go back for seconds.

I went to stand, but the guard pushed the trolley right next to me and pulled the metal cover-trays off heaped plates of food. Crispy bacon, steaming eggs
scrambled just how I like to throw them up, grilled onion, and toasted Turkish bread. These guys knew way too much about me for comfort. That didn’t stop me from grabbing a plate and heaping it full of food. I was ravenous, and I wasn’t really sure how long I’d been out cold from the gas. It could have been yesterday since I last ate. Felt like it.

After I was full enough to actually breathe between bites, I drained my second cup of coffee and wiped my mouth with a napkin.

“You appear to have enjoyed that,” said White, who’d stayed silent the entire time I’d been eating. “Now it’s time to talk, Mister Stoner.”

“I thought that was what we’d been doing,” I said. “I must have imagined it.”

“Serious, Mister Stoner. Serious. I need your help, and you need mine.”

THREE

An hour later, I was still just as confused, and a lot more pissed. I was ready to tear a hole in the two goons outside, anyone else in the building, the idiot in the van who’d started all this, and pretty much the whole damn world.

According to White, there was an echelon of chimerics that had an international supervillain organization no-one was aware of, and it was his job to make sure they stayed down in their holes, not coming up for air, and not causing too much trouble.

“You can make a difference,” he’d said. “You need our help,” he’d said. “We’re at war, and you’ve been dragged into it,” he’d said.

“I don’t give a fuck about your war. I just want to make a few bucks and live a quiet life.”

“Too late for that.” White lifted the remote and activated the screen again. It showed a street view, as though from a dash-cam.

“Great. More slasher flicks.”

“Shh.”

As I watched, the viewpoint swung around a corner and I recognized where it was going. The mall.
My mall
. Where I’d been this morning when all this shit had started.

As the view hit our parking lot, I saw my car, I saw the van, and I saw myself standing over a guy on the ground, my leg bleeding. The image froze there.

“This is the moment your life irrevocably changed,” said White. “This is the moment you left the normal world and entered
my
world.”

“I don’t get what you mean,” I said. “That’s the moment I kicked some ass, and then you guys came along and kidnapped me.”

“Ah, but is that all that really happened?” asked White. “Was that just a psycho you took down, or was there more to it?”

“A meth-head who can fight a bit better than most. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”

“Not true,” said White. “There’s more to it than that. Much more.” He pressed another button on the remote, and the view zoomed in on the outstretched arm of the creep I’d fought. I looked. The fingers seemed weird. As the scene closed in more and more, I could see what was different. His fingers ended in what looked like claws. Not just long, sharp fingernails, but solid, honest-to-god claws, like a bear or a cat or something. White was right. The guy
was
a chimeric.