Bad Jack ((Ascension: Book 1)) (11 page)

Chapter 27: Return to the
depths

He asked Billy to wait outside his office when they got back. He explained that he wanted to work a little more on his bio before he had to study any more artifacts but he really just wanted to play with the death ball.

Billy had a look that
suggested he objected.

“Ten minutes is all you get,
and then you have to rush to make up for it. It’s almost ten and you haven’t analyzed a single artifact yet.”

Jack
found that he could not only make the ball move about in the air at will but he could spin it around on any axis he chose. With a little practice he managed to do both at once. He wondered if it was possible to get it going fast enough to break the pull of gravity and send it off into space. He imagined anything was possible.

He quickly hid it
away when Billy knocked with the first of today’s specimens. It was an hourglass with black sand inside. The sand flowed upwards and then back down perpetually. When Jack touched it the sand stopped moving.

How the hell was he going to write this one up?

At two o’clock Melanie arrived and his heart jumped in his chest. He hadn’t expected her. When she’d walked in he was in the middle of scratching his inner thigh. He thought about explaining to her that he wasn’t scratching his nuts but some things are better left unsaid.

“Where’s the
Doctor?”

“He’s waiting for us downstairs. He said he had to finish doing something
so he asked if I would come and get you. Is that alright?”

Jack smiled. “It’
s preferable actually. Lead the way.”

After they dealt with the inappropriate door guard and got sanitized by the clean room, the door
to the creature vault opened. Doc Collins was waiting for them.

To
Jack he said, “I’m thinking you know your way around well enough by now. Why don’t you just come down tomorrow unescorted?”

Jack nodded, unaware
until now that he was even allowed to walk freely down here. He had access so why not? Then again, he didn’t think he’d be volunteering his time down here outside of the block of time the Doc insisted upon; it was still so surreal to him and it gave him the willies walking through the door. Just to cement his thoughts, the werewolf howled.

Melanie tried to remain calm this time around. They were given a quick walk around of the prisoners.

When it was over the Doctor seemed to be struggling with something in his head. The quiet was almost unbearable when he eventually said, “I think it’s time for you to see the catalyst.”

Jack felt dizzy. He was scared out of his senses but he was excited to find out the whole story behind the weird objects and impossible creatures.

The Doctor led them through an unlocked door at the back of the warehouse. A single corridor ran a hundred feet or so straight ahead. Either side of it was pocked with doors. Most of the doors stood open as they followed the Doc.

Jack peered inside
one and saw what looked like a simple hospital room. There was a single bed with a dresser next to it, a large mirror on the far wall, an old tube style TV on a stand across from the bed and a curtained off area where the shower stall and toilet were hidden away. They passed another two rooms just like it, all of them unoccupied at the moment.

Jack
asked, “How many patients are there?”

“You are right that it’
s a patient but wrong in guessing there’s more than one. We have to move this patient around every once in a while.”

“Why” asked Melanie.

“Here, let me show you,” he stopped before an open door and shook his head, “no not this one, here,” and he led them to another room. “Go in and see for yourself.”

Melanie strode into the room waiting for the other shoe to drop and when it did she buckled over gasping for air. Jack grabbed her under her arms and dragged her out into the corridor on instinct. It turned out that as soon as she was out of the room she went right back to normal.

She stood up and breathlessly asked, “What the hell was that, a ghost or something?”

The
Doctor ignored her question. “What did you feel in there?”

She contemplated this
for a few seconds and replied, “It felt like the end of happiness. Everything inside me was raped and scratched at.”

The
Doctor wrote this down in a little notebook and leveled the same question at Jack. Only then did Jack realize he’d also been in the room and yet he’d felt nothing. He told the Doc as much and the Doctor noted it.

“Every room’
s different. The one on the end will fill you with so much joy and contentment that you’ll never leave. You’ll just sit there and drool and mess yourself until someone finds you and lassos you out of there.”

Jack
asked, “So what is it then? Is it ghosts like Melanie thinks?”

“Oh no.
We’re not sure exactly what it is but it seems to be a residual anomaly and it does dissipate as time goes by. You’ll see. Within a week most of these rooms will be fit to inhabit once more. We rotate them in and out as needed. Come, I’ll show you the subject.”

Jack noticed the subtle change from referring to the guy or girl or alien as a patient to now referring to it as a subject and it made the hair on his arms stand tall. Whoever or whatever was down here, he was now sure, was not down here of their own accord. The
Doctor was studying it, not helping it.

Melanie touched the base of Jack’s back to usher him ahead of her and it took all his strength to stop himself from turning around and kissing her.

Inappropriate thoughts, inappropriate thoughts, bad Jack, he told himself.

Chapter
28: Jessie

The boy was no older than ten. The Doc called him Jessie as he sat at the foot of his bed and smiled at him. The kid smiled back but he was far more interested in his new visitors.

Doc
Collins said in his best grandfatherly voice, “These two lovely people are called Jack and Melanie. Can you say hi?”

The kid’s arm slid out from under the covers and he waved a little salute their way.
He was slightly tanned, with black shiny hair and light colored eyes. He appeared healthy enough except that perhaps he was a bit underweight.

Jack was getting impatient.

“Good to see you Jessie but we must be going now.”

The
Doctor shot him a look that stopped him in his tracks. “We’ve reached our destination.” He gave a nearly imperceptible nod toward the child in bed.

Jack squinted even though he knew it made him look
dense. Melanie walked forward, smiling sweetly as she joined the Doctor at the foot of the bed. Now Jack was stuck standing unless he wanted to sit right on the kid. He slowly made his way to the kid’s dresser and rested half his ass on it as he leaned back casually.

The kid didn’t know
what to make of all the hubbub. He stared at the Doctor questioningly.

Finally the boy looked up at Jack and said, “I think I know you. Do you know my daddy?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t think so, buddy.”

Jessie stared at him the way ten year olds do; with no concept of what
is appropriate and what is not. Jack smiled to himself when he realized he was staring back just as intently. The others must’ve thought he and the boy were having a battle of wills or a juvenile staring contest. Jack blinked first, on purpose.

The
Doctor leaned over Melanie to ruffle the boy’s hair as he whispered, “We’re going to go now Jessie. I’ll get some yummy lunch sent in and then you can take your afternoon nap.”

The child argued “I’m not tired. I want to play video games
,” but the Doctor insisted.

“You can play after your nap. I promise this time.”

The Doctor ignored the pleas of the petulant child as he led the adults out of the room.

There was a panel set into the wall
. The Doc opened the door and pressed a call button. A voice came over all crackly and distant but Jack heard it say, “The food is ready. I’ll have it sent down right away.”

The
Doc closed the panel door. “Be patient guys, you’re in for a surprise.”

The presence of the child nearly irritated Jack. He’d expected a wormhole or a wizard or some type of alien technology but instead he got
a ten year old sleepy, whiny boy. But he put his irritation away because the Doctor had promised them more.

The
Doc led them through the door at the opposite end of the corridor from where they’d entered. It turned out that this door branched into two more corridors, one heading to the right and one to the left, each wrapping back around so that they were now walking along the opposite side of the rooms in a corridor parallel to the first.

What Jack saw didn’t exactly surprise him. At intervals of about every twelve feet was a viewing window into each room. The mirrors in the rooms must have been two way so the
Doctor could observe his subject. The very idea creeped Jack out. They stopped at the one looking into Jessie’s room. There was a camera mounted at the top of the windowsill and two speakers on either side so that everything inside could be witnessed and recorded.

They watched as a fat guard entered Jessie’s room and set a tray of food on his lap.
The boy pretended to eat it but as soon as the guard closed the door he slipped out of bed. He took the tray over to the toilet. He tore his sandwich into flushable sized chunks and deposited them in the bowl. He flushed and then tipped everything else from the tray into the bowl except the little plastic bottle of milk. He flushed again and dragged his weak, spindly little frame back to bed, dropping the tray on the dresser as he went. He labored over the security tab on the milk bottle but eventually got it. He drank the whole thing down in one gulp. He picked his remote up off the dresser and turned on Power Rangers.

Jack looked over at Melanie
to see how she was taking this and almost leapt out of his shoes; the lunch delivery guard was right next to him. The guard noticed his panic and gently put a beefy hand on his shoulder.

“Didn’t mean to scare you
pal.”

The
Doctor whispered, “Give him five minutes then cut the power.”

The guard nodded and wandered off down the corridor.

Jack started asking questions when his patience stretched thin.

“It’s best if you see it for yourselves. No explanations from me will do it justice” The
Doc explained.

Five
minutes in a dark, quiet corridor was grating on Jack’s nerves. He’d always had problems with silence; he didn’t know why that was.

If he had the death ball right now he’d go out into the warehouse and play catch with the werewolf. He paced back and forth but decided to gut it out when he noticed the
Doc and Melanie casting anxious glances his way; he was annoying them.

Just as Jack was about to leak out of his skin the lights in the kid’s room went out.

Over the speakers they heard the kid say “dickheads,” as the covers rustled about.

Chapter 29: Manifestations

After a few more minutes the boy stopped moving around and his breathing slowed.

If Jack hadn’t been told that he was about to witness something amazing he might be wondering right about now why he was standing in a darkened corridor with two strangers spying on a kid through a two way mirror as he slept.

Then several things happened all at once. The room
suddenly looked like it was full of fireflies. Small flashes of light strobed on and off all over the room, and they grew in intensity to the point that the room was nearly fully illuminated.

Where the sources of light had come from Jack couldn’t guess
but as he took in the entire scene he noticed that the things that looked like fireflies really were fireflies only bigger and with more erratic behavioral patterns.

Then the glass of the viewing window frosted over
. Jack assumed this must happen all the time when he heard a fan kick on and felt warm air blast past him to defrost the glass.

As the melted glaze dripped down the window they saw the boy thrashing about under his covers. He was having a night fit or something.

He sat bolt upright and screamed “daddy” and all the fireflies exploded at once drizzling real fire all over the floor and furniture but leaving the boy and the bed unscathed. Jack yelped and was about to rush in there to help when the Doc stopped him.

“The boy’
s completely safe. Trust me.” 

The room was cast in flickering shadows as the flames licked themselves to death and then finally the room returned to darkness.

Jack assumed the show was over but he was wrong. The floor of the room flickered with tiny sparks of white light and then fell completely dark.

When
Jack crept closer to the window to see what was happening he regretted it.

Melanie jumped back and elbowed him in the stomach by accident.

The Doctor just said “Curious,” and jotted something in his notebook.

The floor in the boy’s room was crawling with huge spiders.
Even in the insufficient light, they were easy enough to spot. There must have been hundreds of the things.

Jack’s first instinct was to just start running but then he realized that they were
probably pretty safe on this side of the glass. The next thing he realized was that Melanie might lose some respect for him if he suddenly took off shrieking and flailing his arms, screaming “Don’t let them get me!”

The spiders started crawling over one another trying to get close to the bed but they couldn’t get closer than a foot
away. They struggled against this invisible boundary and Jack feared for the child’s life again. The spiders kept pushing against this boundary and this was where the mass of spider bodies was the densest as they fell over one another and built up into a semi circular mound around the bed. The mound grew into a writhing half-ringed wall as the spiders continued to try and push toward their prize, the tiny sleeping boy in the bed. The wall grew and grew and it looked like the higher it got the closer to the child they were getting but it just appeared that way. The walls bent inward finally encapsulating the boy in a hollow bubble of spiders.

The struggle continued for just a minute or two
but Jack sensed that the boy was safe, protected somehow, but the illusion was shattered when a scream came out over the speakers.

It was the boy’s
frightened voice. “Get away from me.”

This only seemed to excite the spiders as their frenzy erupted anew and Jack barked, “Get him out of there.”

Just then the spiders began to vanish one by one.

Jack leaned forward against the glass and saw the
spider-wall begin to collapse as spiders on the bottom simply blinked out of existence.

When reality normalized and it looked like the spiders were gone, the lights in the room blinked on.

Jack rubbed his eyes and touched Melanie’s arm. “Did we really just see that?”

“I saw spiders, what did you see?”

“Spiders too.”

The
Doctor looked at them quizzically and finally said, “It wasn’t a hallucination. What you saw was real.”

Just to punctuate his assertion with a thousand exclamation points a huge spider crawled across the floor and disappeared under the dresser.

The Doctor pointed at it. “We need that.” He said into his walkie talkie, “There’s a specimen under the dresser. If you didn’t see it on the monitors it’s under the right hand side, I can just see one of its legs poking out. Be careful.”

To Jack he
explained, “It’s rare to get live specimens. I was expecting maybe something mundane like an object or something, maybe nothing at all. This is the crème de la crème. You’re lucky to witness such a thing.”

Jack felt a lot of things right about now but lucky was a stretch. Horrified was a better word.
Pukey, that was another good descriptive word for how he felt.

Two men, one of them the fat guard from earlier, briskly entered the room with a plastic bucket
and a mop.

The boy was stunned
by the intrusion and wrapped his blankets over his head as the men got to work.

The fat guy used a mop handle to push the brick sized spider out from under the dresser. The other guard barely fit the bucket over it and gingerly lifted it enough to slip a lid underneath. He
turned the bucket right side up and snapped the lid shut. He held it aloft for the Doctor to see through the two way and then he left the room with the bucket held in front of him like it was a bomb.

The fat guard took some time to look around
for additional spiders or fireflies and satisfied himself that there were no more of either.

He looked
into the two way mirror, “The room feels spooky. I’ll get him moved to room seven.”

When the guard exited the
Doctor said into his walkie talkie, “Moron, use the walkie, not the window. The boy will figure it out if you keep talking into the mirrors.”

“Sorry
Doc” was the reply.

Jack took a deep quavering breath. “So where did they come from, his dreams?”

The Doctor smiled. “There’s no way to know for certain but that’s our best guess. These creatures and objects just materialize whenever he sleeps.”

Jack said, “Pffff, well whatever. Sure. Why not?”

He realized his brain had regressed to the teenage sarcasm default that sometimes happened when it was closing off compartments to maintain sanity. It didn’t happen often.

Melanie chuckled nervously. “When you say
we
can’t explain it, who else are you referring to?”

“I work in conjunction with a fellow
researcher named Oliver. He’s quite brilliant. You’ll meet him, I’m sure. He’s in the monitoring station right now working on extrapolating any data he can get out of this event.”

Jack mumbled, “So all this shit comes from a fucking dream then?
I thought you were going to give me answers, not bigger, dumber questions.”

“Perhaps together we can figure this thing out.”