| Shadowed Alcoveby Max Criden He opened his eyes and blinked a few times. Everything was fuzzy. He was lying on his back, on the ground. In some kind of facility. It was chilly. Things slowly seeped into his regained consciousness: the mission. The objective. Saying he just wanted to make sure everything was on the level. He blinked a few more times. Deep breaths. One, two. One, two.
“I need you to get in and get our intel,” the General had said. Bits and pieces were coming back now. Breaking into the facility. Stealing that guard's uniform. Ignoring the beads of sweat forming a necklace on his forehead. He had to admit it was all a little bit of a blur at this point. Whoever had knocked him out—or whatever had happened—he didn't seem to have lost anything. His taser was still in his left hip pocket, the emergency firearm tied to his right ankle. He absent-mindedly grazed his kevlar vest. No sign of any attack on his person. Walkie-talkie still in his belt. Okay. He could work with this.
He surveyed his surroundings. There was nobody around. He figured this was as good an opportunity as any to attempt contact. He switched on his walkie and it buzzed to life with ethereal static.
“General Smith? This is Elliott.” His own name sounded strange and distant.
A few moments later: “Elliott? What the hell happened?”
He sighed. He'd hoped he hadn't lost much time. “Sir?”
“Just what is going on down there, Elliott? This was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab. Get in, get the intel, get the hell out. Everything's going fine, we're right on schedule, and then you up and disappear for a solid 45 minutes. I'll ask again: what happened?”
45 minutes, Jesus. That'd never happened before. “I—I can't really say,” he said, trying to retain some modicum of confidence. “I woke up on my back.” He felt kind of stupid saying this. At best, this probably made him a disappointing field agent, likely knocked unconscious by a guard. At worst, this would cause Smith to suspect him of defecting. It was a little suspicious either way.
“Your back,” Smith repeated, feigning patience. “Were you knocked out?”
“I think so, yes, sir. It's a little bit of a blur.”
“Okay,” said the General. “We can talk about this later. For now, focus on the mission at hand. Get those documents.”
“Yessir.” The two men exchanged rigorous pleasantries masquerading as simple goodbyes, and Elliott set out to resume his mission.
He'd barely considered his next course of action when he heard footsteps coming down the corridor. He sidled into a conveniently-located—and thankfully shadowed—alcove nearby, and kept his breathing as quiet as possible. He heard the two guards stop midway through the corridor.
“But this isn't possible,” the first man said, out of breath.
“Come on, Gary. What's the meaning of this?” The second man, whose voice hit all the right notes of skepticism, was clearly the superior officer. He let out a long-suffering sigh.
“Look, he was right here. I don't know what to tell you. I came up right behind him and unloaded.”
Suddenly Elliott had a terrible sinking feeling. It began in his temples, and slowly snaked its way down to his ankles. His fingertips went numb.
“You got the drop on this guy,” the other man clarified. “And you shot him point-blank.”
Elliott suddenly felt very sick. He struggled to maintain even, quiet breathing. One. Two. One. Two. “Yes,” said Gary. “I walked right up to him—”
In the alcove, Elliott's left leg began to shake nervously. He attempted, and failed, to steady it with his hand.
“—unloaded my clip into his back—”
An intense feeling of déjà vu washed over him. Strange memories started flooding in.
“—he teetered a little like he was wearing a vest—”
All at once, Elliott remembered what had happened. This guard, this “Gary,” had snuck up on him and...there had been at least 6 rounds fired. He remembered hearing the distinctive pop of each one. Three had hit the vest.
“—and fell back.”
Elliott instinctively reached under his shirt, and felt his left shoulder. The two scarred-over gunshots wounds he felt there sent a brief chill down his spine. He grimaced, and checked the base of his neck, where he found a similar scar. His head was buzzing with adrenaline. Three shots that should have killed him had knocked him out. Even stranger, he'd recovered from them in 45 minutes. And not only recovered: they'd fully healed and scarred over. What had happened to him?
“Be that as it may, Gary,” the other man began. “If what you're saying is true, someone's cleaned up the body. Go check with the perimeter guards; see if they've seen anything suspicious. I'll be in my office.”
“Yes, sir.” The two men walked off in the direction they'd came in, their footsteps clanking against the cold, hard floor in unison, until they split off into two separate beats after a few minutes. Elliott continued to compose himself in the alcove. Nothing made sense. The scars didn't even ache. This struck him as a funny thought: it was bizarre enough that his gunshot wounds had so quickly healed, but even stranger that they'd healed so fully.
Elliott could only think of two possibilities, both of them preposterous and surely, highly unlikely. His first thought had been that he'd been concussed, and was experiencing some strange dissociative moment. Perhaps he'd received the wounds a long time ago, and his mind was just playing out some unusual drama, imagining up the guards and their claims. After all, he hadn't even interacted with them, he'd only heard them. Maybe they were only in his head.
The second possibility that occurred to him was that this was a set-up. Maybe the General was in on it, perhaps this was all a cruel game. Maybe he'd been injured, extracted, comatose, fully healed, and put back into the situation they'd found him in, the exact place he'd been shot. After all, the intel was bad. Nobody was able to warn him about the guard who'd come up to him and shot him? Surely that was extremely unlikely. Surely gathering intel in this day and age was a cinch, and someone, probably the General, had intentionally not told him about the impending injury. Yes, that must have been it: he wasn't going crazy, he was simply a rat in a maze, the victim of a strange psychological test. How much time had he really lost, then? 45 minutes? No, that had been a lie, part of the manipulation. It might have been days, weeks, even months. He felt a strange rush of euphoria and fear. What did these people want with him? For now, he'd have to go along with their game, and try to glean some hint or clue in the process. Yes. That was the way.
Elliott skulked towards the control room, staying in the shadows whenever possible. As he made his way through the facility, he overheard a number of mundane conversations between various guards. They spoke of the last barbecues of the summer, of hamburgers and corn on the cob and potato salad. They discussed their children's impending return to school, and lamented their need to purchase them new outfits and supplies. Elliott was no fool; these men had been well-trained to make sure their small talk subtly referenced the “correct” time of year. If these men were telling the truth, which was extremely unlikely, Elliott was certain that his scars must have been some kind of bizarre prosthetic or make-up, given how little time would have elapsed. The scars felt real, though. So the guards were surely simply acting.
As he neared the final room, Elliott thought he heard strange, distant voices, emanating from somewhere far away, somewhere beyond the rigid confines of the facility. As he knocked out an unsuspecting guard with a swift chop of his arm to the underpaid lookout, and swiped his keycard, he strained to make out what the voices were saying. Somewhere buried deep within his consciousness, Elliott knew these voices. While unable to make out their words, he could at least recognize one voice as maternal, the other teenaged, raspy, unsure. He knew there was some greater significance to these bizarre voices, some deeper meaning, but try as he might to grasp at it, he found himself thoroughly unsuccessful.
Elliott was finally at the door to the control room. He slid the automated keycard through the scanner, and the door slowly slid open to reveal a guard, poised at the entrance, coolly staring him down. Elliott paused for just a moment, and in that briefest of instances, the guard quickly raised his sidearm and shot him in the jaw, expertly dispatching the intruder. As Elliott fell backwards, crumpling onto the floor, his only thought was of the unusual voices, and how he'd never find out what they were now.
When Elliott regained consciousness, he instinctively reached for his jaw, which was now healed and scarred over. He blinked his eyes open, once, twice, and saw above him the bewildered guard, one hand over his mouth, robotically poised. “This can't—you can't—” the guard stammered, trying to make sense of the unlikely resurrection he'd witnessed. Elliott lunged at the guard, knocking him into the control console at the other end of the small room. The guard kicked back, but Elliott was faster, stronger, better trained, and readily rendered his assailant unconscious.
Elliott looked around the control room, trying to locate the documents. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stick up, and thought he caught a glimpse of some ethereal reflection in the window. When he wheeled around to look more closely, there was nothing there. After a moment, he sat down in the unconscious sentry's chair, and massaged his temples. All of his elaborate theories about what had happened when he was previously brought back to life surely went out the window. He'd been killed. He'd been killed, and a moment later he was on his feet again. Unless—unless this was what they'd wanted him to think. Unless they were just trying to get him to second-guess his previous theories. In that case, maybe it hadn't been a moment he'd been knocked out, but hours, days, or weeks, and for the second time.
This elaborate and cruel experiment was too much for him to take. It wasn't right that he be subjected to this. What did the General—if he even really was a General—have to gain from this bizarre and deeply unethical plot? Surely this was the work of evil and deranged men. Elliott knew his previous plan of just trying to complete his objective and pick up further clues along the way was destined to fail. He turned back toward the window and shattered it with the butt of his firearm. Beyond the window frame, he saw vast, empty static, a snowy nothingness that seemed to extend into eternity. Elliott hopped up onto the ledge and jumped out into the ether, quickly fading away into the hollow emptiness of the outside, his thoughts turned toward the peacefulness he felt at having escaped.
Elsewhere, a teenage boy successfully pleaded with his mother for fifteen more minutes, but a few minutes later was extremely disappointed when the video game on his TV screen turned to pure static.
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