Bad Jack ((Ascension: Book 1)) (7 page)

Chapter 16: The Escort Girl

In reflecting back, Jack was surprised that seeing a clone of himself sent him over the edge. He’d have thought the werewolf would’ve been the tipping point.

Once they were fanned off and UV’d the doors slid open and the
Doctor had a word with the security guard at the door.

Jack was too beside himself to flirt or even check her out now. He stood twenty feet down the corridor like a petulant child
waiting, staring at the tiled floor like he might find some meaning in it.

The
Doctor caught up with him when he was done and said, “I noticed that you and your security detail don’t have a great relationship.”

Jack sighed. “Yeah, his name’s Billy and he aimed a gun at me yesterday
for eating that apple. I’m not his biggest fan right now.”

The
Doctor nodded. “Of course, of course. Ordinarily I would recommend a promotion for Billy under these new circumstances so he can escort you down here when I’m not around but with the animosity between you two and the fact that he’s only been employed for a couple of months, I just can’t justify that. Melanie back there has agreed to do it instead. I’ll have to make an exception in order to get her the appropriate clearance but that should be no problem. I saw you two eyeing each other up and I thought why not?”

Normally Jack would have appreciated the gesture but not today.

He faked it saying, “Thanks Doc.”

The
Doctor gave him a wink and a sly grin as he said, “She thanked me too.”

Chapter 17:
Back to normalcy

Billy was waiting for them outside the elevator doors, General’s orders surely. The Doctor remained in the elevator after reminding Jack about their two o’clock meeting. He also emphasized that nothing Jack had seen downstairs was to be described in any way to anyone. He didn’t say ‘punishable by death’ but by this point Jack just inferred the threat.

Jack let Billy follow him to the door of his room. He shut the door on him without saying a word. What could he say anyway?

He took a much needed shower and was pleased to see that the General’s promise to remove the hard liquor from the hideaway cabinet was an empty threat. He screwed open a ten year old scotch and found a tumbler. He noticed his hands were shaking as he poured a couple fingers worth.

He dashed it back just as the General entered his
apartment.

This just pissed Jack off.
“Get out now. From now on you don’t come in here without knocking first, do you understand?”

The General stood straighter
, squaring his shoulders. Mockingly he said, “Well well, haven’t we gotten a tad high on ourselves lately. You think because you have more access than I do that it means a hill of beans but it doesn’t. I’m still in charge of this part of the facility. You still take orders from me up here.”

Jack stood up and stared
down into the General’s eyes. To his credit the General didn’t seem fazed by it.

He
said simply, “It’s called human decency sir, try it out, you might just like it.”

The General
visibly relaxed and said, “Of course, just stating the obvious. I don’t want you thinking that whatever you’ve got going on with Doctor Collins trumps the work we have to get through up here. I’ll knock from now on, promise.”

Jack sighed and got another tumbler from the kitchenette. He poured the General two fingers and refilled his own. The General asked for some water and
he obliged, filling the glass the rest of the way with tap water.

He
said, “I thought you were going to get rid of these bottles.”

“I figured you might need them for awhile
, at least until you get comfortable here. You’re a big boy. If you don’t want them here, you dispose of them.”

“I think I’ll hold onto them for a bit.”

“Sure”

“So what brings you here?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me. Are you still allowed to work with the artifacts or has the good Doctor found better ways to make use of your talents?”

“He told me to meet him at
two o’clock again tomorrow so I’d assume I’m ok to keep working until then. You’re really into those artifacts, huh?”

“It has become my entire reason for being.
” The General furrowed his brow. “But we can’t get anywhere with them. The folks downstairs who know more about them aren’t talking and I understand that, but none of our tests work. We built a chemistry lab in your office but no samples can be removed from the artifacts; they’re indestructible, can’t even peel a chip off for analysis. We’ve tried breaking most of them just to get a look inside, but again, they don’t break under even immense pressures. Lasers are useless and x-rays too. All we can do is weigh them and photograph them, that’s about it. We have a group of people who just touch the objects and report what they feel but it’s all subjective. One person might touch an object and report that it makes them feel angry and another person touching the same object will say it gave them diarrhea. You were our one last chance to glean some info from them and for a second I thought we’d lost you too.”

“Well, I suppose if the
Doctor did want me to quit you could always just find another psych major to do my job, right?”

The General gave him a double take.

“The psych major part’s of no interest to us. Why bother psychoanalyzing an inanimate object, you know? We need an expert on symbolism.”

“They’re a dime a dozen.”

The General seemed to be choosing his next sentence deliberately, cautiously.

“Like I said, we needed someone with no ties to the outside world.”

Jack interjected, “Right, in case you had to execute them. Don’t want someone’s sister or father snooping around asking questions, right?”

“There’s that, sure. But we needed someone desperate
enough. No offense. We needed someone so desperate that they’d do whatever we asked them to do even if it frightened them. You see, we had some trouble retaining staff in the beginning. People would freak out and insist on being excused from the research teams. They’d want to go home to their families, they’d fixate on it and it would drive them insane. We had to change our criteria after that. The hiring process became much more exclusive and exhausting. You have no family and your job was pretty mundane. You didn’t have much going for you out there in the real world. You were and still are the perfect candidate for the job.”

Finally the General was speaking to him like an adult. He appreciated that more than anything else in the world just now
even though Dave had basically just called him a giant loser.

The General
rejected his offer of another glass of Scotch.

He stood up and said, “Let me know if you need anything else
,” and left for the night.

Chapter 18: Going Home

As much as he loathed
the idea, he had to speak to Billy.

He wanted to go back to his apartment and get some things. He wanted his ipod and his
expensive aftershave and his own book on dreams. The publisher had given him a neat stack of them for free but he was too self conscious to give any away to acquaintances so they collected dust.

Billy said he’d get approval to go offsite
. He was back within twenty minutes with keys jingling in his hand.

Jack’s apartment was about
three hours away, in Kenosha. If Billy knew they were only going for knick knacks he’d probably offer to buy everything Jack needed just to avoid the drive. It would be eleven o’clock by the time they got back.

But Jack’s
brain was fried and he hoped that seeing the old familiar surroundings would calm him. Bringing back some creature comforts from home would help him settle in to his new living arrangement too.

Another, more basic part of him just wanted to escape for awhile
and breathe some cool air away from the facility.

The drive was tense. Billy didn’t say a word and Jack didn’t
encourage him. Finally, when the GPS started acting goofy near his apartment he had to give Billy play by play directions to the front entrance.

Billy asked if
he wanted him to wait in the SUV but Jack told him he’d be just a minute. He double parked and Jack got his door key out and opened the front security door to the common hallway. His apartment was on the first floor, the third one down on the right side.

When he turned the tumbler and went inside the sight of an unfamiliar
overweight Hispanic woman rummaging through his stuff caught him by surprise.

She saw him before he could react. She was short and plump and looked like anything but a burglar.
She looked like someone’s mom. Then he saw the butt of a gun dangling inside her coat and decided she was trouble.

She
must have been just as shocked to see him. She reached into her coat and snatched out a cell phone. She hit a button and spoke into it like a walkie talkie, staring right at him the whole time.

“He’s here. Jack Mayberry’
s in the apartment.”

F
eeling violated and threatened by her presence he lunged at her but she sidestepped his leap and swung her arm around in an arc.

He hit the floor like a dead weight.

When he looked over his shoulder she had the gun leveled at his back. He thought about yelling, hoping Billy would hear it and burst in but Billy was definitely no faster than her trigger finger.

The woman said in perfect English, “Where did you come from?”

He sat up, looked into her eyes and decided to tell the truth since she had the gun, “I just came here from work.”

“No you didn’t. You haven’t been to work in
days. Your boss said you quit.”

He
thought about that for a second. This woman had been to see his former employer. Was he wanted for a crime or something? Was she a plain clothed cop?

“No, I came from my new job. Why are you here?”

“Don’t play dumb. I know they recruited you. We both know why I’m here. Where is he? Where did they take him?”

Jack didn’t know how to respond to this. She must have seen in his face that he had no idea what she was talking about.

“You mean to tell me you don’t know what you are? Have you even met him yet? He called for you to help him, you know that right?”

“Who?”

“Our savior. The messiah. The only one that can cleanse this terrible planet. He called out for you. Did you not sense it? Your name is Jack Mayberry, right? He’s in danger and you are his last hope.”

Jack had seen all manner of madness today so this didn’t much surprise him.

The old Jack from a couple days ago would piss his pants and beg for his life and plead with the crazy woman to drop the gun but new Jack was a little more tempered to this kind of bullshit.

He was picking himself up when a big black dude burst in through the front door.

He looked at Jack, “I can’t believe it. You’re here.”

He looked at the Hispanic lady
next, “Put that fucking gun away you stupid bitch.”

He walked right up to her and backhanded her across the mouth. Her lips started to swell before the gun was even holstered.

“He came at me Daniel. He flew at me like a madman. What was I supposed to do?”

Daniel
snapped back, “What do you think happens if this man dies? Our savior asked for him by name, beckoned for him. This man is to be the savior of our savior. Let the magnitude of what I just said sink in and then tell me what possible reason you could have for pointing a gun at him.”

She rubbed her tender lips and looked at her feet.

Daniel turned to Jack. “I’m so sorry for that. I’m not a violent man and I’ve never hit a woman before but you are just that important. I need to ask you a few questions and then I need to take you with us to debrief you on the situation. First of all, where are they holding him?”

Jack s
hrugged, “She’s been talking about some messiah guy too but I haven’t got the faintest idea what you people mean.”

Daniel looked like he was deflating. “Have you felt drawn anywhere in particular in the past couple of days?”

“I took a new job with the government. I didn’t feel drawn there except by the money they offered.”

“
That’s not what I meant.”

Daniel
paused and tried a new line of questioning, “Where’s this new job of yours then?”

Jack was about to tell him when a shot rang out deafening everyone
in the apartment.

The black guy threw his body in front of Jack the way the Secret Service does to protect the President. The lady dove behind the couch but Jack saw her hand reach inside her coat
for the gun before she disappeared from view.

Jack’s ears were ringing but he could hear Billy’s voice calling for him.
Billy ran up and kicked the black guy in his head, soccer style, before the guy could find his feet. He grabbed Jack’s arm and tugged him out of the apartment.

They
heard a shot report but they were already down the hallway, opening the front entrance.

Billy bundled Jack into the passenger seat and got behind the wheel just as a rusty s
tation wagon whipped around the corner, scudding on two wheels. There were two men and a woman in the car, all Caucasians, and they were staring right at Jack.

Billy floored it and the s
tation wagon gave chase. Either the folks in the rusty car realized there was no way they were going to overrun the SUV or they decided to just lay back and follow them because the vehicle slipped further and further from view. Once they hit the open freeway Jack saw the little rust bucket still behind them, trying to keep a safe distance, follow them to their destination.

Jack
voiced his hunch so Billy got his phone out and dialed a number. He explained to someone, maybe the General, that they were being followed by hostiles. He gave an accurate description of the vehicle and their location and hung up.

He took the next exit off-
ramp and meandered around the city streets, winding this way and that. Jack asked what he was doing and Billy said he was told not to lead the station wagon back to the facility. He was given coordinates to get to and he was supposed to circle around until reinforcements arrived.

“So those two men and the woman in that car are going to be killed by guys just like you. I’m starting to think you guys are the bad guys lately.”

Billy explained matter of factly, “They won’t be killed, not out here. We have the authority to use deadly force but we need to use discretion. Hopefully we’ll capture them and take them in for questioning. They know nothing of our research so they don’t pose a real threat. They’ll probably be sent off for indefinite detention somewhere.”

Jack felt somewhat better about this plan now. The last thing he wanted was for anyone to die on account of him.

After an hour or so of navigating city streets Billy’s phone chirped.

“Ok
sure,” he said into it as he pulled up to the curb and parked.

An SUV just like the one they were in pulled alongside and a uniformed officer Jack had never seen before rolled his window down and spoke to them
.

“They must have taken off. There’s no sign of a car following you. The General requests the presence of you both as soon as you get back.
You’ll be lead car, we’ll take up the rear and the helo will make sure we aren’t followed.”

With that he rolled his window up and they pulled away into traffic.

Jack saw the SUV slide in behind them once they hit the freeway. He didn’t see or hear t
he chopper the entire ride back but as they parked in front of the building he heard its whipping rotors overhead as it landed atop the facility.