RADIOAKTIVITÄT
Sean Patrick Hazlett
In a secluded corner of Fort Meade, Major Julian Skaggs made his way across an open, snowy field. A crisp wind howled as it swept in from the west. Ahead, a massive evergreen flanked two nondescript single-story white buildings hidden behind a threadbare screen of oak. Built during World War II, the structures were stained with the soot of age. Testaments to the military’s focus on function over form, the buildings had one primary purpose: not to draw attention to the people or activity inside them.
With mangy black hair, jeans, and a bulky Members Only jacket, Skaggs looked like any old schlep off the street, unless the observer knew what to look for. His wiry frame and careful movements would have told them that he was anything but ordinary.
Skaggs covered the distance quickly, anxious to get his next assignment. Finding Muammar Gaddafi’s location in support of Operation El Dorado Canyon had been a bust. Something had blocked Skaggs’s perception, and on several subsequent targets, he’d been off. He needed a win and fast. Otherwise, the DIA’s Directorate for Science and Technology would probably send him back to the Army where the green machine would shove him into some Regimental S-2 shop. There he’d waste away moving plastic North Koreans on a giant map or get skull-fucked by the big green weenie for incorrectly analyzing a boot print in a pile of DMZ night soil.
No. Fuck that, he thought.
He was gonna get a win, and he would do whatever it took to make that happen.
He headed toward the larger building on his left, the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s DS-T remote viewing unit.
He typed in his access code at the front door, and entered the facility. To his chagrin, his civilian boss, Dr. Alvin Nowak, was waiting for him in the hallway.
Nowak’s expressionless demeanor betrayed nothing about what the man was thinking. For a remote viewing unit, it was maddening. The man adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose and said, “Major Skaggs, I have a very special project for you today.” Then he turned and started walking toward his office.
The man’s matter-of-fact delivery betrayed nothing. Meant nothing. Suggested nothing. Major Skaggs could find himself doing anything from a coffee run to a short-term field assignment in Nicaragua supporting Operational Detachment Delta. He couldn’t read a damn thing from the man’s humorless face.
So like a good officer, Skaggs just nodded, and followed his boss. When Skaggs entered the room, he immediately noticed it was much dimmer than usual.
Dr. Nowak sat down, adjusted his blood-red tie, and said, “Close the door.” He motioned for Skaggs to take a seat in front of Nowak’s mahogany desk. The good doctor folded his hands, then stared directly into Skaggs’s eyes for ten uncomfortable seconds.
To fill the awkward silence, Skaggs felt a nearly insurmountable urge to speak. But he knew better than that. Nowak would most certainly use anything Skaggs said against him. So it was best to stay silent, especially given all the rumors about the man’s involvement in several CIA black projects associated with the occult stretching all the way back to the ’60s and ’70s. Some whispered that Nowak had worked closely with members of the Thule Society who the Army had extracted from Germany as part of Operation Paperclip. The scuttlebutt was Nowak had conducted disturbing experiments on unsuspecting American citizens—experiments so unnerving he’d allegedly gotten thrown out of the agency after the infamous Church Committee hearings in the mid ’70s.
“Major Skaggs,” Dr. Nowak said, carefully enunciating each word. “Your results are less than satisfactory.”
Skaggs felt a lump in his throat. “Well, yes, sir. About that . . .”
Dr. Nowak held up his right index finger. “Hold on. I’m not finished. And it’s Doctor, not sir.”
Skaggs shut his mouth and meekly nodded.
“I was going to send you back to a Regular Army unit, but another government agency requested you by name for a very specific mission.”
The major desperately wanted to know which agency, but Skaggs knew better than to speak unless Dr. Nowak specifically invited him to. So he waited for the doctor to finish.
Dr. Nowak glanced over his right shoulder, then his left, then back again at Skaggs.
Skaggs was surprised to see two tall men dressed in black suits and wearing fedoras. Cloaked in shadow, they had been standing there the entire time. Even in the darkness, they wore shades.
“These two gentlemen have an assignment for you,” Nowak said. “This Special Access Program is separate from Project SUN STREAK, and you are not, under any circumstances, to share the mission’s details with any of your colleagues.”
“Understood,” Skaggs said. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of one of the men’s faces. It was pale and skeletal. For a brief instant, Skaggs felt nauseated, but couldn’t quite figure out why.
Dr. Nowak snapped his fingers in Skaggs face. “Major, look at me. Ignore them. Your assignment will involve a mixture of remote viewing as well as some limited fieldwork. This assignment is of the most sensitive nature. There are very few men and women alive who have knowledge of this Special Access Program. You could count the bigot list on the fingers of one hand.”
The bigot list included the personnel who were read in on a particular program. Some say the term had emerged during World War II, prior to the Allied invasion of North Africa. It was a reversal of the codewords “TO GIB,” meaning “To Gibraltar.”
Skaggs nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on Dr. Nowak.
One of the men handed Nowak a smooth, cylindrical, ivory container with a lid. The doctor accepted the item from the man’s gloved hand without looking back. Figures adorned in togas and other regalia reminiscent of ancient Greece decorated the container. The impressions were painted in red and black. But it was the image on the lid that caught Skaggs’s eye. It was like gazing into a mirror, only it wasn’t a mirror, it was a face that could have been Skaggs’s twin.
“Before he left for Thermopylae, Leonidas gifted this pyxis to his wife,” Nowak said matter-of-factly.
“It looks as if it were made yesterday,” Skaggs said.
Nowak stared directly into Skaggs’s eyes. “That’s because it was.”
“What do you mean?” Skaggs asked, now deeply curious.
Ignoring the question, Nowak pulled a slip of parchment from the artifact. A series of eight Arabic numerals—a number system that didn’t exist in Ancient Greece—were scrawled onto its surface.
“These are your coordinates,” Nowak said. “Put everything else aside, and provide me with a full write up of what you see by tomorrow afternoon.”
Skaggs nodded. It was protocol to receive nothing but an eight-digit number for a target. Providing any other detail about it would make it more difficult for a remote viewer to objectively describe it. Any scrap of information beyond the coordinates might tempt that viewer to pull everything he or she knew about the target from their mental Rolodex or imagination, which could negatively impact results. The best way to work with the subconscious was to know as little as possible about the target other than the coordinates that represented that target’s gestalt.
What was odd though was the presence of the strange artifact. So strange, in fact, that despite Dr. Nowak’s apparent limited tolerance for questions, Skaggs felt compelled to ask another question: “Is there anything significant about that artifact I should know for my session?”
“No,” Dr. Nowak said. “More information will be forthcoming once you complete this initial assignment.”
“Got it,” Skaggs replied. “Thank you, Doctor.”
As Skaggs rose and turned to leave, Nowak interrupted him. “Oh, and Skaggs?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“After you repeat the eight digits at the beginning of your first session, I want you to say the following: ‘Tune into the memory.’”
Before he could stop himself, Skaggs said, “What?”
“Tune. Into. The memory,” Nowak repeated as if to hammer home the point.
“Tune into the memory,” Skaggs said. “Got it.”
Skaggs left, now more confused than ever.
* * *
Tune into the memory . . .
In the building adjacent to the one where he’d received his coordinates, Skaggs sat at a rectangular table in a dimly lit room. He grabbed a single sheet of blank paper from an inch-thick stack on his left. He read the target’s coordinates aloud, then recited Dr. Nowak’s peculiar mantra: “Tune into the memory.” On the left side of the page, Skaggs quickly jotted down the target’s coordinates and let his subconscious push his pen across the sheet to form a signal line.
A series of images buffeted his thoughts. He’d never had perceptions this crisp or clear.
He felt chaotic motion as if the ground were shifting violently beneath his feet. He could smell smoke and burning meat. He heard screams.
His perceptions came at him so fast, he struggled to record them all. A majestic red structure collapsed into the ocean. It gave him a strong impression of the Golden Gate Bridge. He quickly classified the vision as an analytical overlay to ensure his mental interpretation didn’t corrupt his session. He continued to watch buildings and other structures quake and crumble.
Without warning, there was a dark stillness. His perception telescoped upward into the stratosphere. When he looked down, he saw the unmistakable contours of California as it shattered and flooded moments after a tsunami had claimed its fractured ruins.
Then his consciousness was flung further forward in time.
An Asian man of relatively advanced age in a black suit with red tie and wearing a jade half-mask covering the right side of his face, sat at the front of a large auditorium where he held court among half-starved masses. A cordon of Chinese soldiers kept him a safe distance from the desperate crowd. Behind him, a Chinese flag stood above that of California’s Bear Flag Republic.
With dizzying speed, Skaggs’s vision catapulted forward again. A family of barely animated and shivering cadavers shambled forward through an ash-covered mountain pass. Skaggs’s gut grumbled in sympathy with their intense hunger. Two emaciated children and their desperate parents struggled uphill through mountains peppered with smoldering fires. The melted hulks of tanks and armored personnel carriers littered their path. In the smoky distance, soldiers wearing helmets and gas masks, and dressed in gray environmental suits, ushered the refugees toward a shimmering pale blue light into which they disappeared. And beside these men stood a single metallic sign rattling in the cold wind that said: Radioaktivität.
Skaggs immediately ended his session. His heart pounded. His face was slick with sweat.
What the hell was that?
To center himself, he took a deep breath, then set about writing up his session summary.
In his analytical mind, his visions made no logical sense. They were all over the place. But one thing was constant: an oppressive cloud of hopelessness overshadowed everything.
Deep in his gut, he knew what he’d seen had been quite real. Yet he would prefer to lose his billet here than for those visions to become true.
“Dr. Nowak, I’d like to offer an apology,” Skaggs said, placing his session notes on his boss’s desk. “But I don’t think I had such a great session.”
Nowak adjusted his spectacles. “Is that so?” He grabbed the session notes and leafed through the material. He stopped and looked back up at Skaggs, giving the major an inscrutable look, then said, “In that notion, Major Skaggs, you are most assuredly mistaken.”
“Huh?” Skaggs said.
“Because the scroll with your target coordinates mentioned you by name and described what you would see. You saw your face on its lid, did you not?”
“Wait. What?” Skaggs tried to keep his comments to a minimum. “Why?” The experience seemed so surreal that it could only be a test.
“Reality is not precisely linear,” Nowak said cryptically. “So you see, you are not only the right man for this job, but also you are the exact man.”
“Do you have a sense of what I’m supposed to be looking for?” Skaggs ventured.
“Yes,” Nowak replied, then stared at Skaggs from across the mahogany desk.
Skaggs stood there and waited for Nowak to say more.
“Now that you’ve confirmed what this scroll predicted,” Nowak continued, “you are to proceed to the next coordinates.”
“Okay?”
“I would like you to do another session this evening. Then leave your write-up on my desk before tomorrow morning. Time, however flexible it might be, is of the essence.”
Skaggs tightened his jaw. Nowak’s apparent refusal to share information along with his order to do a double shift were aggravating.
“Yes, sir,” Skaggs said, then dutifully wrote down the coordinates.
As Skaggs turned to leave, Nowak said, “Yes, Doctor. And don’t forget to repeat the mantra.”
Skaggs again faced Nowak, “Tune into the memory.”
“Exactly,” Nowak said, all business.
A single Asian man stood in the way of a tank column moving through a massive concrete square. The lead tank attempted to drive around him, but the civilian moved with it, denying it access to the plaza beyond.
Then it was night. Battalions of soldiers arrived on armored personnel carriers and streamed into the square. A crowd of unarmed civilians, many barely older than adolescents, opposed them. The massacre that followed was difficult to observe. It was even tougher when Skaggs felt the protestors fear and despair. They reeked of death.
Again, his visions were clearer than they’d ever been. He was certain this was China in the near future, but where, he could not guess.
Before he could catch his breath, his consciousness was yanked backward in time.
It was a misty morning over a dense primeval forest. Its mountainous highlands were lush with fir and pine, while birch, oak, and beech peppered the lowland’s undulating hills.
Skaggs could feel a slight chill in the air.
As if waking from a dream, something flashed in the gray morning sky. The clouds glowed as if they’d been bombarded with white phosphorus.
Then Skaggs saw it: a silvery disk streaking across the heavens at an unimaginable speed. An explosion followed, burning a hole into the hitherto peaceful forest.
An unseen force nudged Skaggs slightly forward in time. A group of soldiers stood around a silvery disk, their mouths agape in wonder. They pointed at the object and spoke to one another in German.
Skaggs consciousness shifted again still. This time he estimated he’d moved ahead several years. The same silver craft rested in a massive hangar. Regiments of German soldiers stood in review as two very young men in World War II–era SS uniforms entered the object. Moments later, the craft began to wobble, then levitate. Slowly it floated out of the hangar, then zipped into the atmosphere.
In an instant it was gone.
A moment later, the craft hovered back into the hangar. The soldiers remained at attention. From a place with no discernable seams on the craft, a cavity opened and two men exited.
In his mind’s eye, Skaggs looked deeper. He noticed these were not the same men who had entered the craft minutes earlier. They seemed at least one or two generations older. One man’s hair was white with age. The other was completely bald. But as Skaggs peered closer still, he noticed similarities between the men who had entered the craft and the two who now stood before the German regiment.
Then the realization of what he saw crashed down upon him like a demolition of the Empire State Building:
These were the same men, only creaking with the disease of age.
How was that possible?
Skaggs frantically scribbled down his impressions. Filled with words, he pushed the sheet aside, grabbed another, and continued to furiously capture what he experienced.
He shifted in space, but curiously, not in time, and found himself amongst the smoldering remains of a 1940s New York, then Chicago, then Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Kansas City, Las Vegas, and on and on and on.
His consciousness spiraled backward in time in what felt like an impossible stretch of infinity.
From space, Skaggs beheld a beautiful blue and green world that looked hauntingly similar to Earth, only instead of seven continents, a single massive landmass coiled around the globe like a serpent. On its dark side, a vast array of lights dotted the planet’s surface.
Something drew him downward.
In moments, he found himself among great dark green columns that spiraled upward in counterrotating sinuous patterns that reminded him of a double-helix structure. Thousands of cloaked saurian bipeds passed between the columns. The reptilians hummed an eerie melody that made the very air vibrate in sympathy. Then came thunder and lightning. The earth quaked, and the columns wobbled until they collapsed into dust. The very air burned with the intensity of a supernova.
Skaggs winked back into outer space where he witnessed a great pillar of light atomize the once great civilization. And again, some hidden power propelled him far forward in time as the mighty continent sundered and churned. Tectonic plates crashed upon one another, giving rise to a massive tsunami that swept across the continent, destroying all in its wake. The scarred wound of the lizard people’s annihilated city remained fixed in his vision as a shimmering eye of concentric circles. As the passage of time seemed to decelerate, the vast rings of West Africa’s Richat Structure were all that remained of that shining city.
His mind’s eye narrowed its focus onto a hidden cavern nestled in the folds of the encroaching desert. And in that cavern, was a translucent diamond tablet. And chiseled on that tablet, was a set of coordinates—coordinates Skaggs could not read through remote viewing.
A week later, Skaggs was on a flight to Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital. It was that country’s largest city and deep-water port on the eastern Atlantic rim.
As Skaggs stepped out of the plane, the Western Sahara’s simmering heat washed over him. All around, through a kaleidoscopic prism of floating grains of sand, stood the great tent city of Nouakchott. Not a single building rose higher than one story.
Skaggs sighed in relief that he and the four Delta operators wouldn’t be spending much time among those desperate masses of humanity. Instead, the team would trek northeast through the western desert for over six hundred klicks in three Land Rovers carrying nothing but water and fuel. The Delta operators had also arranged for three Berber guides to smooth their passage through any tribes they might encounter on their journey to the Eye of the Sahara.
As dangerous as the expedition might be, operating in the city would’ve been far worse, especially since it had only been two years since Colonel Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya had deposed his rival, Colonel Mohamed Khouna Ould Haidallah. The new boss was very keen on maintaining his tenuous control over his sparse desert nation. Mauritania was the last nation on Earth to abolish slavery in 1981, but according to US intelligence, the slavers were still very much active. Running into them was something Skaggs was very keen to avoid.
All but one Delta operator drove each of the three Land Rovers, while the fourth, a chiseled man of medium height who went by the name “Bill” sat shotgun in the lead vehicle. From there, he directed their infiltration into the lonely Sahel. A Berber guide also accompanied each vehicle. In the second Land Rover, Skaggs sat next to the driver, a laconic Southerner who went by the name “Lance.”
The trucks rattled through the late afternoon and into the evening. The temperature dropped quickly, and Skaggs shivered in the approaching darkness.
At twilight, Lance quickly powered up his AN/PVS-5 night-vision goggles to avoid switching on his headlights and drawing any unwanted attention.
As the covert caravan meandered through the open desert, Skaggs was struck by how quiet it was. At the same time, there was so little ambient light, he could clearly see an infinity of stars above.
The long, lonely journey gave Skaggs time to think; time to reflect on why he had traveled across the Atlantic to acquire an artifact he’d seen only in his mind’s eye. And based on that fragment of trained intuition, the US military was willing to gamble on Skaggs’s impressions and support the mission by sending four of the US military’s most lethal operators.
And yet, Skaggs had this strange but utter certainty that his hunch was anything but one. The artifact was the key; a key to a gate he had yet to uncover.
Navigating through the empty desert illuminated by the eerie green light of his NVGs, Lance slowed the Land Rover to a near crawl, then stopped. He turned to Skaggs and said, “Wait here.” Lance grabbed his CAR-15 rifle and left the truck, running forward to the lead vehicle.
The Berber guide behind him just stared blankly at Skaggs, as if oblivious to the sense of danger Skaggs felt rising in the distance.
Moments later, Lance returned to the Land Rover and whispered something in Arabic to the Berber. The Berber replied, shaking his head emphatically. Lance paused for an instant, then pointed at Skaggs. “Grab your rifle. Someone else is camped about a klick from here who shouldn’t be.”
Skaggs stared at Lance, dumbfounded. “Wait, we’re going to assault these people? How do we know it isn’t a Berber encampment?”
Lance jerked his thumb toward the guide. “Because our friend here insists none of his people are in the area.”
“But how do we know they aren’t just a bunch of unlucky tourists?” Skaggs pressed.
“Because our intel—intel no one shared with you—indicates the Chinese are operating in this region.”
“The Chinese? I thought you were gonna say the Soviets. Why the hell would they be all the way out here?”
“That’s need to know. And all you need to know is they’re hostile.” Again, Lance pointed at Skaggs’s rifle.
Skaggs had been in this game long enough to know not to push any further. So he grabbed his weapon and NVGs, then crept out into the night.
The encampment was a modest affair. About ten men crowded around a solitary fire. On the perimeter, four more clutched AK-47s and stared into the darkness.
Skaggs felt incredibly uneasy being part of this effort. As far as he knew, these people had done nothing to him. But he simply had to resign himself to trusting that Bill had good reason to kill these men. And that was something that was very hard to do.
The mathematics of conflict dictated that he and the four Delta commandos were outnumbered by nearly three to one—and they would be on the attack, not the defense. Any soldier in the conventional Army would tell you that anything outside a three-to-one advantage was a suicide mission.
But not Delta.
The operators crawled into position and silently slit the throats of the four men watching the perimeter. Blinded by the light of the fire, it would have been difficult for the men sitting there to see anything in the blackness.
Bill had insisted that Skaggs remain at a distance until the killing was done. A mercy for which Skaggs was thankful. Impersonally liquidating strangers just wasn’t his bag.
Skaggs heard and witnessed three flashes of precisely aimed and synchronized shots. In under three seconds, there were nine bodies lying in the sand. The lone survivor, a rail-thin Asian man sat serenely, gazing into the fire.
In accented English, he said, “None of you is Major Skaggs.”
Bill paused, as if the man’s words had been unexpected. “Skaggs! Get over here!” he yelled.
A sense of foreboding electrified Skaggs’s skin like a fractalized aura. He steeled himself, then headed toward the scene.
Bill grabbed a walking stick from one of the bodies, ripped a strip off a dead man’s clothing, tied it around the stick’s edge, then lit the rag with a Zippo. He pushed it in the man’s face, not quite touching it, but close enough to make the man scream. Withdrawing it, Bill said, “Where is it?”
At that instant, Skaggs walked in from the outer darkness. The man’s eyes glowed in apparent recognition. “Major Skaggs. You are as you appeared in my vision.”
There was something oddly familiar about the man, but Skaggs couldn’t quite place him.
Burning the right side of the man’s face with the torch, Bill repeated, “Where is it?”
The man’s screams echoed in the darkness.
As the man’s face bubbled and smoldered, he cackled. “It’s in the cave. We did not come for that. We came for Skaggs.”
Skaggs stepped forward and pushed the torch away from the prisoner’s smoking face, which smelled like a seared steak. “Why did you come for me?”
“Only to relay a message,” the Asian man said. “It is thus: I serve the Manchurian; you serve the Tibetan. Your nation and my nation compete in this space and timeline. But our masters play the great game in all space and all time, and in every permutation of reality. The quickening is coming. Soon. Very soon.”
Bill lifted his rifle and aimed at the man’s chest. Skaggs pushed the rifle aside. “No. Leave him be. He’ll never make it out of the desert alive anyway. Let’s recover the artifact and then get the fuck out of here.”
Hesitating for a moment, Bill then quietly nodded. “Lance and Zed, watch the prisoner and maintain far-side security. Mike and I will take Skaggs to the cave to retrieve the package.”
And before he knew it, Skaggs and the two Delta operators were racing through the desert to a cave on the outer rim of the mysterious Richat Structure.
Mike and Bill entered the cavern first, creeping silently and guided by only the dim green light of their night-vision goggles.
“Clear!” Bill shouted, signaling Skaggs to enter the cavern.
Through his night vision, Skaggs could see that the cave was no deeper than the inside of a CONEX. Painted on the walls were images of warriors and elephants and lions, and half a dozen other flora and fauna no longer found in the desolation of the Western Sahara.
“Where is it?” Bill said impatiently.
Skaggs held out his hand. “Give me a moment.”
Closing his eyes, Skaggs took in impressions from the chamber around him. He observed the distant memory of saurians blasting a hole in the rock. They appeared to him like superimposed images overlayed on his reality. He watched as they placed a glimmering clear tablet into the hole. Then one of the shades looked directly at him across the gaping chasm of time and space, as if to indicate that some grand design beyond all human comprehension had reached a decisive point. The being then sealed the hole with some kind of energy device just before Skaggs’s mental projection faded into oblivion.
“There!” Skaggs said, pointing to the far back corner of the cave. He scampered over to the area and reached into and through what appeared to be the mirage of a solid rock wall.
The two operators watched in awe as Skaggs retrieved a clear diamond tablet. To his surprise, the tablet had nothing more than a series of eight Arabic numerals.
How could a nonhuman civilization that existed hundreds of millions of years ago possibly know about Arabic numerals? Skaggs thought.
“I need to do a remote viewing session,” Skaggs said.
“Okay,” said Bill, “but not until we get back to our vehicles.”
At a gut level, Skaggs was certain what he had to do.
“No,” he said. “I need to do the session right here. In this cave. Now.”
Bill approached Skaggs and grabbed his shoulder, but the glare Skaggs gave him convinced him to step back. “Okay,” he said. “But be quick. We need to be on the move before dawn. Otherwise, Lance and Zed could be compromised.”
“Understood,” Skaggs said.
Skaggs pulled out a pen and a small notebook from his hip pocket. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths to lower his heart rate. He repeated the eight digits out loud.
A flurry of images blasted into his consciousness. He again saw the man with the jade half-mask giving orders to a military man. His vision shifted to watching that same officer giving orders to fire on a group of protestors at a place called Tiananmen Square.
And with the vision, Skaggs had a horrifying realization: it was the same man that the Delta operators were holding back at the camp.
Another image appeared in Skaggs’s vision—CONEX boxes filled with weapons and soldiers unloading at night in a port on the southwestern tip of a narrow island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait.
Moving forward a day, a vast armada of aircraft bombarded a large industrial facility. Skaggs’s vision shifted west in space. He saw flashing red as the NASDAQ collapsed in sympathy to the loss of ninety percent of the globe’s advanced semiconductor capacity.
Moving months forward, he watched in horror as a manmade genetically engineered pandemic infected the unborn of non-Han Chinese parents, birthing a generation of children with a crippling skin disease that prevented them from ever feeling the sun’s warmth. Weeping mothers cursed the Sun Sickness that consigned a generation to darkness.
And then as if drawn in by the dark ethereal tendrils of some otherworldly entity, Skaggs felt himself descend into the depths of self-loathing in a dark pool hidden somewhere in the Kunlun Shan Mountains.
Stuck like a fly in a spider’s web, Skaggs felt helpless. The dark silhouette of a man shaped like a human slug, unable to move, but gifted with tremendous mental and psychic power, gazed into his soul, greedy to pry away its secrets.
In a sort of knowing, the entity, which Skaggs sensed was a hybrid being, warped by decades of Frankensteinian genetic manipulation, inundated Skaggs’s mind with a warning: The Tibetan’s cure is far worse than my disease.
Again, Skaggs saw the devastation he’d witnessed in his visions of the 1940s: the alternative timeline where the Nazis had acquired a crashed device and bent it to their twisted will.
You must be the Manchurian, Skaggs thought.
Without answering, the entity replied: This will be your future if my disciple does not return. An image of the man in the jade half-mask appeared.
But my country is destroyed by the Chinese in your future, Skaggs replied.
Only a portion, not the main. America will still exist, albeit in a diminished capacity, and the Thule Society will save some of the survivors by pulling them through a rift in spacetime, only to enslave them on the other side. In the other reality, the Tibetan’s reality, America will cease to exist entirely.
Skaggs snapped out of his fugue. He was lathered in sweat.
What the fuck am I supposed to do?
The sound of small-arms fire in the camp spurred Bill and Mike into action. Bill grabbed Skaggs and pulled him along.
In the distance, Skaggs saw two rail-thin men in black suits and fedoras silhouetted against the rising sun—the same men who had been standing behind Dr. Nowak’s desk.
“Wait!” Skaggs yelled. “They’re friendlies!”
Just as the words passed through his lips, Skaggs sensed something wasn’t right.
After having unloaded rounds into the two men, Lance and Zed ceased fire. Their eyes were wide with shock as the two men-in-black calmly marched forward, past them, and toward their Chinese prisoner.
“No!” Skaggs yelled. “Don’t touch him!”
The enigmatic men still strode forward.
Panicked, Skaggs took off in a sprint. He needed to close the gap. If only they knew the stakes.
As Skaggs drew closer, he could more clearly see the men’s gaunt and skeletal features. Their skin was a pale beyond white marble. Their eyes, black as solid orbs.
“No!” Skaggs yelled.
One of the men reached for the Chinese agent and grabbed him by the throat. The agent screamed. His face was drained of all color as his body shriveled like a prune.
By the time Skaggs arrived, the Chinese agent dropped to the ground, his body nothing more than a wrinkled and desiccated husk.
“You had no right to do that,” Skaggs said to the men. “You’ve condemned us to a horrible fate.”
“No,” the murderer replied in a thick German accent. “We have merely restored the proper timeline. Tune into the memory. You will see that the world is already returning to its correct course.”
Tune into the memory.
Skaggs fell to his knees. A wave of melancholy overcame him. He had failed, and now the world would suffer.
“What should we do?” Bill said as he and his men wavered, their rifles trained on the dark strangers.
But Skaggs was too lost in his own despair to reply. And then he remembered. The men-in-black had cut the Manchurian’s thread by executing his totem, the man in the jade half-mask. What if the only place that timeline existed was in Skaggs’s memory—a timeline that required Skaggs’s continued existence.
What if I didn’t exist? Skaggs thought. What future may come of it?
He had no choice. He had to do it now before he changed his mind.
Skaggs turned to Bill. “Shoot me.”
“What? . . . Why?”
The two men-in-black raced toward Skaggs at almost supernatural grace and speed.
“Shoot me!” Skaggs yelled.
Bill hesitated.
The men-in-black were seconds away from grabbing Skaggs.
Aiming his rifle at Skaggs, Bill fired.
“Major Skaggs,” Dr. Nowak said, carefully enunciating each word. “Your results are less than satisfactory.”
Skaggs felt a lump in his throat. “Well, yes, sir. About that . . .”
Dr. Nowak held up his right index finger. “Hold on. I’m not finished. And it’s Doctor, not sir.”
Skaggs shut his mouth and meekly nodded.
“I’m going to send you back to a Regular Army unit. This just isn’t working out.”
Skaggs shrugged. It figured. But he wasn’t surprised. Failing to find the location of Muammar Gaddafi in support of Operation El Dorado Canyon seemed enough of an excuse to shitcan him. Oh, well. He supposed it was time to take another one for the big green weenie. And if Skaggs were truly honest with himself, he was never cut out for this kind of work anyway.