Greig Beck - Dark Rising

On the bed, Alex Hunter’s body seemed at war with itself. His teeth were bared and both arms, broken free from the restraints, hammered at everything around him. The heavy metal cabinets either side of the cot were heavily dented, the one on his left showing a deep split in the quarter-inch steel.

Captain Graham, his eyes fixed on the carnage within the room, was speaking frantically into the phone. ‘He’s having an episode – he’s tearing us apart.’

‘Put me through,’ Hammerson said.

Graham hurriedly pressed the communication button and the major’s stern voice boomed through the speaker in Alex’s room.

‘Arcadian!’

The EEG flattened and Alex quietened. A few seconds later, he opened his eyes.

‘Captain Hunter, report,’ Hammerson ordered.

Alex blinked for a few seconds before responding. ‘Fort Bragg Medical Centre – assisting science personnel with further physiological and psychological testing.’ He looked around him and saw the wreckage and the paralysed orderlies, still too shocked to move. He exhaled and said with a hint of resignation in his voice, ‘Seems I had another dream while I was under, sir.’

Alex looked at Lieutenant Marshal. ‘Did I hurt anyone?’

‘Everyone’s okay, Captain Hunter,’ Major Hammerson responded, before any of the medical staff could speak.

Alex rubbed his face hard and dragged in a long juddering breath. ‘My dream – it was Aimee again,’ he said softly to Hammerson. ‘Have you heard from her? Is she okay?’

Hammerson wasn’t surprised by the question. The dreams had been the same for months now. ‘Saw her just the other day,’ he said. ‘She’s fine and getting on with her life.’

‘Good. Okay, that’s good, I guess.’

Hammerson’s voice became stern again. ‘Captain Hunter, I’ve got some new team members for you. I’d like you to come up and take a look. Be here by 0800 tomorrow.’

‘O-eight hundred, confirmed, sir.’

Alex stood and stretched, rubbed his face and pushed both hands through his perspiration-slicked hair. As he headed towards the door, the injured orderlies backed up a step. He stopped in front of the man with the bulging black eye. ‘It’s Carl, isn’t it? I’m real sorry, Carl, it was an accident.’

The orderly flinched, but gave a crooked smile. ‘No problem, man. Just glad you’re on our side.’

Hammerson’s voice blared into the small room. ‘Good man, Carl – take some extra R amp;R on USSTRATCOM. Just remember, you got injured in the gym.’

Alex apologised again, then turned and pushed through the laboratory’s soundproof doors.

Captain Graham switched the intercom back to his phone, making the conversation private. ‘Jack, there’s something else. It’s Alex’s brain

… it’s… different now. We can only hypothesise based on the EEG and echo pulse readings, but we believe there’s been an increase in neocortical matter. His brain isn’t any larger – we think the additional mass is accommodated through new brain folding, possibly on both sides of his interhemispheric fissures. But without an MRI we don’t know what that extra folding means. I’d love to get in there and have a look.’

Graham’s eyes went to the small electric bone saw in the cabinet of surgical equipment.

‘You think it’s the goddamn treatment causing it?’ Hammerson asked with an edge to his voice.

‘Maybe, maybe not. Maybe a combination of the treatment and his original injury. You ever hear of Phineas Gage, Jack?… Not surprised; he was a railway worker back in the 1800s. Had a metal spike punched into his head. He survived, but it changed him from a happy young man to one who became violent and eventually feared by the entire town. There are all sorts of conflicting stories about the feats of strength he supposedly performed after the accident. When he finally died and they opened him up, they found a brain that was very different from anyone else’s. Thing is, Jack, they believed his brain had continued to change long after the spike was removed. Of course, it might not be the same for Captain Hunter – the extra brain folding could be some form of physical response to the original trauma; or maybe the treatment initiated something else in there, something that’s ongoing. Well, you can see that I’m guessing – could be a hundred things. Bottom line is, we don’t know what the extra matter is for, or, more importantly, what it’ll eventually do to your man.’

‘Could it kill him?’ Hammerson asked.

‘Not sure, but I doubt it in the short term.’ Graham anticipated Hammerson’s next question. ‘Jack, we thought about halting the treatments, but we think that may either kill him or send his system into an irreversible vegetative state. At this stage, all we can do is watch and learn. He’s unique, Jack, and very valuable. When can we have him back?’

‘In a month or two, Graham. Just give him back in one piece.’

Graham was silent for a moment, then spoke with a lowered voice. ‘Don’t forget our agreement, Jack. He’s yours until he’s killed or incapacitated. Then we own him.’ The scientist’s eyes went again to the bone saw.

‘But there was no thermal energy release – there was nothing on the seismographic sensors, not a single tremor. I know it was subsurface, and I bet they had concrete and lead shielding, but that gamma flash must have gone straight through it – a controlled nuclear test blast should have been better contained. The radiation signature reads like something non-terrestrial.’

Zachariah Shomron was arguing furiously with his professor; or rather, with himself, using his professor as an audience.

Professor Dafyyd Burstein clasped his pudgy hands together above a stomach that was straining over a thin belt and raised his eyebrows in a look that he reserved for his best students, those who raised brilliant questions and probably already knew the answers. ‘Are you saying a stellar mass somehow fell to earth in the Iranian desert, Zachariah?’

‘Yes, no, of course not… maybe. It’s just that the pulse had all the characteristics of a cosmic gamma burst, but it’s impossible that it originated from Earth. Though it only flashed for microseconds, it gave off thousands of sieverts. A nuclear blast only delivers about 300 sieverts per hour downwind, but it also throws out neutrons, alpha and beta particles and X-rays. The only thing that saved Iran from being incinerated was the flash’s micro duration… and then, it just turned off. It’s impossible! This is so weird – it’s getting into dark matter territory.’

‘Yoish!’ exclaimed Burstein. ‘Okay, okay, we can discuss all this later. I came up to tell you that there’s a large and serious-looking government type waiting to talk to you in the foyer. Have you been late paying your bills again, Zachariah?’

Burstein took Zachariah by one of his bony elbows and led him towards the door, nodding as the younger man kept up a stream of near impenetrable musings on obscure gamma-wave effects.

Zach stopped mid-sentence when he saw the man in the foyer. He was the most perfectly square human being Zach had ever seen, all hard edges that looked machine-cut, starting from his flat-top crew cut and broad shoulders, and continuing down to column-thick legs stuffed into charcoal suit pants. The man took a step forward and Zach automatically took one back.

‘Boker tov, Zachariah Shomron.’

Zach saw the man quickly check a photograph he held in his hand as if to validate he had the right person.

‘Shalom,’ Zachariah said and tentatively held out his hand for the other man to shake.

Instead, the man pressed a letter into Zach’s hand. It had a distinctive stamp on the front – a blue, seven-candled menorah, the seal of Mossad. There was also an inscription in Hebrew: ‘Where there is no guidance the people fall, but with an abundance of counsellors there is victory’. Good advice about ‘good advice’, Zach thought.