Sixteen (ON HOLD)

4.3 Lunatics

Kate looked across the room at where Ginny now stood, covered in blood and wide eyed in shock. Once the second man in black began to retreat away from Cole and his dead companion, there became a clear separation in the room. On one side there was a righteous group of individuals just trying to survive and on the other side was the enemy. Kate imagined herself on one side and then the other, and couldn’t decide which was which.

 “Show’s over, we’re leaving now.” Troy grabbed Sadie’s hand and started striding towards the front door of the hospital. His head swelled with determination. He wasn’t about to let these humans have the upper hand for another minute. Cole looked at Kate and held out his hand for her to take. He nodded slightly in agreement with Troy’s declaration.

Kate did not mean to hesitate, but certainly she did. It was just long enough for the rest of Brigg’s small black suited army to come up behind them and fire volts of electricity into their backs one by one in quick succession. The weapons were almost silent but the buzzing was loud in Kate’s head as her brain started rapid firing signals that made no sense to her body causing convulsions and flashes of light against the insides of her eyelids. She could hear screams of pain from her friends and outraged cries from the onlookers. Then, for the second time, her world went suddenly dark.

“What have you done to them?” David turned on Briggs, shoving him violently to the ground. Briggs skidded across the floor almost gracefully and sprung back to his feet without effort. He dusted some lint off his pants and glared at David. It was the first time Brigg’s had any hint of emotion at all, and it was disgust.

“Your kind has an affinity for pushing people around. You’ll find that it does you little good when the world you know ceases to exist. If you want to keep that from happening then I suggest you stop working against me.” Briggs walked over to where Troy’s body lay sprawled out on the ground unconscious. Although the boy was over a foot taller and substantially heavier than him, he grabbed both the kid’s hands and drug him along as if he were a sack of potatoes. Walking backwards, he continued to pull the boy out of lobby, his men joining in and taking hold of the other unmoving bodies on the floor.

“And you,” David turned his rage on the Chief, “you’re just going to let Briggs call all the shots now? Even if it means letting him torture and kill every one of these kids, even Katie?”

Tanner couldn’t stop looking at the blood soaked spot on the floor where Kate was lying just moments before. His head was starting to clear and the foggy indecision he had been feeling was starting to give way to a confused fury. His fists clenched at his sides until his knuckles turned white.

“I don’t know what it is,” he muttered, almost to himself, “but I can’t even think clearly when he’s in the room.”

Ginny walked over softly and put her hand on his trembling shoulder. “It’s his eyes, they’re hypnotic. You’re the type of man who looks directly in another man’s eyes when talking; it’s just your nature. Once you did it the first time, he had you. The longer you’re away from him the more your thoughts will clear up, I promise you.”

“How do you know all this, Ginny? How do you know so much about them?” David questioned her, not in an accusatory way but with real concern.

“Because I’ve met him before,” she answered. It was a story she did not want to relive. Most of it had been erased from her memory over time, or maybe on purpose. But she had started to recall it the moment she first heard Randall Brigg’s voice. “When I was seven years old my father disappeared. He used to walk to and from work at the automotive factory. One night he just didn’t come home. Of course people just thought he had run out on us and the police barely investigated. But a few weeks later we woke up and found him sitting at the kitchen table eating frosted flakes like nothing had ever happened. He didn’t know that any time had passed at all, couldn’t say where he had been, he was still wearing the same clothes.”

“Let me guess,” Tanner interrupted, “Briggs showed up that same day.”

Ginny looked down at the watched she wore, the too-large gold watch which of course her father had left her in his will just before taking his own life when she was a teenager. “No, it wasn’t for a few more days. Like I said, at first my father didn’t remember anything that happened. Life kind of went on, enough though I suspected my mother didn’t believe his story one bit. I’m sure she thought he was having an affair of some sort. Then the dreams started. He started having nightmares about where he had been; vivid dreams that he started believing were memories. They bothered him so much he started to talk about them to anyone that would listen. That’s when Briggs showed up.”

Ginny went on with her story in a flurry of words. It was such a release to finally be able to tell it out loud in a situation where it would make sense to people. She told her father’s story of alien abduction as if it were her own, for she had heard it repeated so many times growing up. Briggs had questioned him and when he couldn’t get clear enough answers he placed him under protective custody and took him away. They weren’t allowed to see him and didn’t even know where he was taken. When he finally came home almost a year later he looked as if he had aged ten years and could hardly form sentences his brain had suffered such deterioration. He spent the next eight years in a mental institution before his inevitable suicide.

“Visiting him there was what led me to this line of work I am in now. I wanted to help people like him. Although for most of my life the only part I remembered was that my father disappeared for a time and came back a fragile lunatic. We thought he was schizophrenic. He spent all his time ranting about aliens and the men in black so I researched them and found out they were common schizophrenic delusions, it made sense and I never thought much more about it until now.”

David asked, “If this all happened when you were seven, then you must have met Briggs, what, around twenty five years ago?”

Ginny smiled, “you’re sweet. Try 30 years ago.” Her smile faded when she realized David’s point. “My God, how old is he? He looks the same to me now as he did then, he should look over 60 by now.”

“If he’s not one of them, and he’s not one of us, then what the hell is he?” Tanner almost didn’t get the whole sentence out before they heard shouting coming from down the hall followed by thunderous racing foot steps.

“Think one of them got away?” Ginny asked, almost hopefully.

“I’ll go find out,” Tanner said, “I think it’s best to just follow along like we don’t know anything for now, until we figure this out.”

“Just try not to look into his eyes. He has a way of making you trust him, and it seems to work especially well on you.” Ginny knew that comment wouldn’t sit well with the man’s pride but she needed him to take her seriously. The Chief just nodded, his face turning red, before taking off.

David leaned back against the wall. He was tired and scared and didn’t know what to do next. “My little girl is still missing then, isn’t she?” It wasn’t a question Ginny could answer so she ignored it. She followed in the direction Briggs and the other men had taken the kids out of the room, and David reluctantly followed her.

They walked in relative silence down the hall, looking for a hint as to where everyone wound up. After passing eight or more empty rooms and a few empty corridors a thought suddenly occurred to Ginny, one that she rather wished had never entered her mind at all.

“Where is everyone?” Ginny folded her hands to her chest, she was suddenly freezing.

“They evacuated this place, remember? The staff, patients, even the parents,” David answered blindly, without giving it much thought. He opened another exam room door and looked inside. It was empty.”

Ginny stopped walking and David almost ran right over her. “I mean, where are all the other kids,” she asked. David looked around, taking in his surroundings. The florescent lights hummed but otherwise there was no sound.

“They were in these rooms,” he answered. The pair looked at each other helplessly, silently agreeing that this could not be a good thing.