Jack Adrian was somewhere dark. Deep, inscrutable, impossible. He could feel himself slipping somehow. He saw light. Dim, grey, and flickering, but the light was there. He tried grasping for it, trying to head towards the light of consciousness, but unseen hands kept pulling him away.
In the darkness, fragments formed. They were fragments of his memory, forming and dissipating one after another. Each of them showed Jack's past, his most treasured and most terrifying memories. But this time, Jack could see everything that was going on.
First, he saw himself as a young child. It was strange, as he was looking in on himself from the outside. He remembered the location well. It was St. Anne's Catholic School. It was where he was sent off by parents who he thought were doing it for his own good; it wasn't until later that he learned that the two were settling divorce hearings and getting charged with disturbing the peace and drunk and disorderly conduct.
It showed the dark, teal Ford Explorer drop him off. A nun was waiting there for him, laugh lines and wrinkles. She was patting him on the head and telling him to come inside- congregation would begin followed by arithmetic and lunch.
The first fragment dissipated as the next one became tangible before him. This one was one he thought he had locked away and destroyed until it was only a nagging sensation at the back of his head. But there it was- from an outside perspective and so realistic Jack could swear he could reach out and touch-
He did. And now he was his eight year old self. He tried to gaze down at his hands, or lift them up to his face to verify whether he was in his eight year old body but he found he had no control over his movements. He played out the scene from beginning to end: walking through the half-burnt hallways, looking and crying over children he knew, their pale lifeless bodies stained with vomit, their innards splayed out on the floor around them. He saw Mother Siobhan still in her rocking chair, her wrinkled kindly face half-rotten, half-burnt to the point where she looked like a mummified corpse.
He hobbled towards her on his one good leg. He tripped over an overturned desk and scraped his knee. His eyes blurring with tears, he tried to reach out to her hand. When he touched it, it broke away from the rest of the body with a dry, pronounced snap. Jack stumbled backwards, turning and running out of the room. The ceiling was collapsing in fire and fugue and as the walls came down around him, over the wail of the fire engines and the ambulance, there were the sound of unearthly shrieks. A figure turned the corner down the hall and-
Then the second fragment faded, and a third came. This time Jack didn't reach out to touch the fragmented memory, but sat and watched. He wondered if he could turn away from the memory, but as a bodiless consciousness his attention was unfalteringly fixated on the fragment in the emptiness, and he watched in horror as he realized what was about to happen in the memory.
This one showed Jack, maybe 18 or 19 years old, driving down the streets of Dayton in what you hoped was an old Chevy a bland enough color as to be inconspicuous. He and officer Jessica Locke of the Dayton Police were on their biggest assignment, hopefully finally putting an end to a gang of suspected human traffickers. The steps that took them to this point accumulated to about eight months of research and legwork, and Jack was brimming with satisfaction over how far they've gone and how close they are to catching them.
Jessica Locke had the standard issue Glock 22 that was given to all police officers, as well as a Walther PP sidearm. Jack brought his own Beretta for the assignment. It was the culmination of his first year of service in Vice and he was proud- he wanted to use his own gun to treasure his first major assignment's closing; besides, who would know? He also, in his foolish pride, forgot to bring the ammunition for the Glock from the armaments closet in the police station, much to Jess' annoyance.
He tried to close his eyes when they were about to enter the warehouse, but he was refused the pleasure by whatever dark forces held his head in place. He felt like Alex from A Clockwork Orange, strapped to a chair and being spoonfed images- except instead of mind-altering propaganda, it was the painful shards of his once-tucked away memories.
The door swung open into the long-abandoned Reynolds Theater. It closed down after failing to make profit when the Victoria Theatre and the Schuster Center opened nearby, and it was the center of activity for gangs. Jack had his Beretta aimed and at the ready, while Jessica pulled out her Walther PP and aimed. They nodded grimly to each other and Jack kicked in the double doors leading to the main stage, expecting to see the richly dressed scum- violators of free will and destroyers of lives, feeding off the misery of others- and men and women both paraded on the stage like mannequins or puppets in the slave trade.
They did see puppets.
"No. Nononono-" Jack said in perfect pantomime with his younger self as he looked at the fragment of memory. As an outside observer, it all seemed surreal; Jack hoped it would have lessened the pain, but everything was there in bright, vivid colors and sharp, unnatural sound. The giggling and laughing sounded like something out of a cheap horror movie from the seventies, but in that place and time it chilled both the officers to the bone.
Four men dressed in either expensive business suits or pinstriped suits associated with the Mob were standing up on stage. They weren't quite standing more than they were limply staying upright on the stage. One was nearly floating off the ground. Their heads were bobbed but I could see splotches of blood around the eyesockets and their mouths, some droplets dripping onto the already-tattered suits they wore. They were dangling as if from invisible strings. Then a xylophone and organ combination played somewhere off in the right wing, but it was so flat as to grate the ears and send shivers down the spine.
Suddenly the eyeless, tongueless heads of the four human traffickers raised themselves, and their arms raised, bones snapping or popping as they were lifted off the ground and were made to dance in the bobbing, jumping unnaturally like marionettes. Jessica lifted said, "Shit!", raised her walkie talkie to her ear. "We need backup here quickly. I'm seeing dead bodies here, and whoever perpetrated this is still in the-"
The walkie talkie fell out of her hand and her eyes bulged, miniscule ribbons of blood trickling down from her sockets as she suddenly became rigid. Then by some unseen hand she was pulled onto the stage and taken stage left. Jack never wanted to hear her screams again, but he was forced to. His younger double in the memory was able to move his hands up, to cover his ears and scream himself to block out the sound, but the Jack that was observing from the empty, black world could not.
The lights dimmed and the curtains closed. Jack stumbled backwards, cursing as he made his way to the door. The whole ordeal was disorienting, and he stumbled twice. This time, Jack could see the four suited corpses walking, legs splaying and twisting in a way that was just unnatural, jerking and bobbing as if on unseen strings, towards Jack.
The fragment faded, and in the fourth and final memory he saw he and Susan Locke sitting across from Major Gerard Cobain, hair snow-white and face scarred with battle experience. Susan's eyes were rimmed red with tears and every so often she set her jaw and glared hard at the Younger Jack, eyes a mixture of teary mourning and blazing. Younger Jack squirmed in his seat under the gazes of both Susan and Major Cobain, trying to fiddle his fingers and make sense of all that he has seen and heard in the past seventy-two hours. The pieces were there, and they kind of fit together, but there were big gaps in the puzzle. It wasn't until later that Jack knew that those gaps were left for pieces that could never be grasped and ideas that could never be explained. The puzzle would never be finished and it would remain so for the rest of time.
"You understand that the job you are taking is a hindrance, a liability, and almost an assurance for an excruciatingly painful death," the Major began, saying this fact so calmly and plainly that it made both of the newly recruited mercenaries uneasy. "However, what you are doing will possibly assure the safety and well-being of others. You can make a difference out there. I know I haven't given you all the details over what exactly we do- in fact, the way I see it is that the less of these creatures you know, the less likely you will be to kill yourself or do something else completely stupid. Private Adrian, you've had not one but two encounters with the beings we face, so you seem to have more experience- not in fighting or stopping them, but in understanding or living with them, and in our line of business you have to get experience in both or else you're going to die before you walk out the door." Younger Jack was about to pipe up and ask how the Major knew that, but thought better of it and lowered his head dejectedly. "You, Private Locke, have less experience in understanding these creatures; hell, you called me an 'insane fool' four or five times in the past three days, but you have enough years on the force to easily make both of you equally valuable. In either case, you are now operatives of the Specialized Warrior Operations Against Revenants Division. You can shorten that to SWORD if you like. Now here are your badges, and we'll start training and analysis of some of the missions and beings you might have to face-"
The fragment faded and the Jack faded back into unconsciousness.
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Jack Adrian woke slowly, his mind trying to stay asleep, fragments of memory be damned, as if in rebellion for the inevitable rude awakening. When he did wake up, he found himself laying down on an uncomfortably hard bed, the head rest tilted slightly upwards. He saw the dim glow of two fluorescent lights that did little more than turn the darkness into a somewhat bearable gray. The walls and ceiling were coated in unrecognizable, disgusting substances. He tried to move his arms and legs and found that he was still too tired to walk. He looked around the bleak hospital room. Trays that held rusted and unused surgical equipment lay scattered. Hypodermic needles and syringes lay carelessly across the floor, like pointed traps eagerly awaiting their next victim. There was a desk and swivel chair, both aged atrociously in disuse.
Then he felt a crawling sensation in the pit of his stomach. He undid the IV that laced its way into the vein of his arm and removed the tube that ran up his nose. He turned slowly, checking the floor to ensure that he didn't step on anything sharp. His legs wobbled and he almost fell over into a rather clustered pile of needles, but he reached out and grabbed the desk for support. The desk gave way but he luckily fell backwards instead of forward into the pile. He felt pain in his inner calf as something pointed and possibly deadly broke the skin. He curse in desperation and picked himself up, clinging to the hospital bed for support. He shakily removed the needle from his calf. He could know feel a breeze and realized that he was wearing a white robe used by patients instead of his ACU. He winced in pain as he craned his head up and around and looked out beyond the doorway of the hospital.
Beyond the dim gray of the dilapidated room, there was nothing but blackness.
Kicking aside the debris, Jack looked warily around for something he could use to pierce the darkness that awaited him. He searched the now toppled desk, forcefully yanking open every drawer. There were swabs and tongue depressors and disposable rubber otoscope pieces. He blindly retrieved a jar, checked its contents, and moaned as he realized that there were severed fingers in the jar. The jar burst, sending the digits across the floor to Jack's dismay. He looked at them for a time. The fingers greatly varied, some swelling grotesquely into purple sausage-like shapes, and some withered and dried beyond recovery. Yet another one branched off at the second knuckle to two smaller fingers. He made a point to avoid them as he continued his search for a flashlight, and in his splintered mind a question began to form which he spoke openly, "Why would a hospital of any kind have severed fingers?"
None of the four drawers on the left yielded any light sources, so he went to check the right side. The first two drawers had absolutely nothing- in fact, they were completely empty of anything. Jack thought about this for a moment, wondering with some dread whether or not there was anything else in the remaining two drawers at all. He reached for the third one then jumped back as something slammed against the inside of the drawer. Jack stepped back as whatever was inside began pushing and bashing itself against the door. Small dents appeared, shadows making the punctures in the metal distinct. After a few minutes, the banging stopped. Jack looked for something he could use as a weapon. There was a scalpel on the floor, rusted and possibly dull, but it was the only sharp object in the room besides the syringes or glass shards on the floor, both of which Jack immediately crossed off as impractical and unsanitary. The drawer was the only one of the four to have a lock on it, and the bronze-plated key was already in the lock.
Jack reached his hand out for the lock. Then he pulled it back. He took deep breaths. He didn't know how many it would take before he could safely open the lock. He felt his mind trying to reassure him. "It's okay, Jack. It's in a small drawer. It may have enough rage or power to cause whoever or whatever running this place to lock it in an exam room drawer, but either way it would be the size of a small groundhog. You can take it." His conscious mind tried to reassure himself, but he remained there, frozen, hand just short of grasping the key in the lock. He didn't move into action until one of the two dim lightbulbs in the room fluttered faintly, giving a small electrical buzz, and then, after emitting a bright flash of light, promptly flickered out, pervading the room.
It wasn't just the oncoming, unnatural darkness slowly spreading to him that ate at his mind and caused him to open the door frantically- the flash caused a split-second image to be burned into his mind, and also let loose some light into the hallway beyond. A gangly, unnatural thing with what appeared to be spikes sticking out of it was running across the doorway down the adjacent hall at the time of the flash. It was too blurred to be discernible, but he knew it must have been either tall or it was crawling on the ceiling or wall. He saw two jointed tendrils that he recognized as the thing's arms. They bent backwards. The sight of the creature sent Jack into swiftly unlocking the drawer and yanking on it so hard that the rollers inside the desk broke and the drawer and its contents were sent scattering. He saw it. The flashlight. It was sleek and chrome, unmarred by scratches or blemishes. He pressed the metallic button and sent a shaft of light shimmering out into the hallway just as the other light flashed and gave out.
And he saw the creature again.
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