Peter Cawdron - Feedback

He lay there in a fetal position for the next hour, rocking gently, trying to stay warm on what little straw covered the concrete floor. Outside, the routine crunch of boots passed every fifteen minutes. A sentry was walking a set path, walking along the gravel road at regular intervals.

Shortly after the sentry passed, another set of boots crunched on the gravel, only these were more hurried. They stopped outside his cell. The abrupt silence seized his attention and he turned to see nothing more than a set of legs beyond the bars.

Moonlight lit the courtyard, highlighting the soldier’s legs in silhouette. Something dropped on the ground and was kicked through the bars, landing not more than a few feet from him.

Lee didn’t move.

He lay there looking at the small box no larger than a pack of cigarettes. When he looked up, the legs were gone. He hadn’t noticed the sound of boots on the gravel, so whoever it was had approached from across the courtyard but then exited along the side of the building on the grass, before disappearing god knows where.

Slowly, cautiously, Lee picked up the cardboard packet, examining it in the soft light flooding in from outside. He didn’t recognize the label on the front, and the writing on the back was too small to make out in the faint light, but one Korean word caught his eye: painkiller.

Frantically, he ripped open the cardboard with his teeth. There were two strips of ten tablets sealed in plastic. It could have been poison. It could have been yet another cruel hoax by the North Koreans, but Lee couldn’t help himself. He tore open one of the strips and tossed four or five white tablets in his mouth, crunching them beneath his teeth.

The tablets tasted disgusting. They were bitter and dry, breaking up into a powder in his mouth, making them hard to swallow without water.

As nearly as he could tell, they must have been the North Korean equivalent of ibuprofen.

Lee was surprised by how the sense of taste engaged his mind, drawing it away from the aches and pains, refocusing his world.

Who had given him these tablets?

Had the medic been merciful?

Lee was tempted to take more tablets, but decided it was better to let these take effect and save the rest for later. He’d need them, and he knew it.

Lee stashed the remaining tablets in his socks on the inside of his ankle, feeling paranoid about being searched and losing the painkillers. They were still in their plastic case, so he folded his socks inward, tucking the hem over the tablets, knowing they wouldn’t be seen and feeling as though he’d won a small victory over his captors. That he had something hidden returned a sense of power to him. He took the cardboard packet and forced it between the grates of a drain, getting rid of any evidence.

Lee wasn’t sure how effective the painkillers actually were and how much of a placebo bounce he was getting out of suddenly having a sense of purpose, but the pain subsided.

As he moved back by the door he noticed a scrap of paper lying on the straw. It must have fallen out of the packet as he’d ripped it open with his teeth. He unfolded the paper and read one word scrawled hurriedly in pencil: Midnight .

“I don’t understand,” Jason said, getting off the motorcycle inside the back of the semi-trailer, surprised by how much his legs were shaking. For a moment, he thought his legs were going to give out beneath him. With the swaying of the truck, Jason felt clumsy, and had to reach out for the inside of the trailer to steady himself.

Lily put the motorcycle on its kickstand and hopped off of it.

“Jason,” she said, gesturing toward the professor. “This is my father, Captain John Lee of the South Korean National Intelligence Service.”

“Am I dreaming?” Jason asked. “Tell me this isn’t real. None of this. None of this can be real.”

“Please,” Professor Lachlan said, pulling a thick folder from under his arm and gesturing at a crate loaded against the wall of the trailer. “Have a seat. There is a great deal we need to tell you.”

“I…” Jason was speechless.

Lily scooted up onto the crate, leaving room for him beside her. She patted the wooden surface, signaling for Jason to sit next to her.

“It’s OK. I don’t bite,” she said. “Well, at least, not on good days.”

Given all they’d just been through, her small joke seemed almost normal, bringing a smile to his face.

The truck swayed and Jason lurched. He widened his stance, fighting to keep his balance as the truck rounded a corner. He reached out and grabbed the edge of the crate, pulling himself closer.

“We have a ways to go,” the professor said. “We need to get well clear of the city before they have time to analyze the video footage and realize where we’ve gone. We chose Lexington for the switch because there are no traffic cameras in that block, only a few surveillance cameras mounted on ATMs. That should buy us a few hours.”

“What’s going on?” Jason asked, raising himself up on the crate and leaning against the thin sheet metal wall of the semi-trailer.

Lachlan held up his mutilated hand, displaying the stumps of three fingers, saying, “You don’t remember, do you? No, you wouldn’t. You were young, too young, and so much has happened since then.”

Jason pursed his lips. For him, the strangest thing that had happened so far was not the insane motorcycle ride flying across a lake, or riding up into the back of a moving truck, or even running into his physics professor in the middle of the night in the back of a semi, it was the sense of calm that swept over him as Lachlan spoke. There was something familiar about the professor’s words, as though he’d heard them before. The professor had always had a calming effect on him, and now more so than ever. Jason didn’t understand why, but he trusted Lachlan implicitly.

“None of this was our doing,” the professor continued. “For decades, we lobbied against the subterfuge, but DARPA insisted. They felt the best way to get information from you was to allow you to be free. Your subconscious seemed to be providing them with the answers they wanted, so they allowed you to live a normal life while they collected the data they needed, but progress has been slow. In the last few weeks, there’s been a change of administration. The presiding general decided it’s time to bring you in and extract the knowledge that’s buried in your mind. They’re tired of waiting and they don’t care if they break you.”

“I don’t understand,” Jason said. “None of this makes any sense.”

“They were coming for you,” Lily said, cutting through the explanations and going straight to the heart of the issue.

“Me? Why me?” he asked.

Lachlan raised his hand, scratching at his forehead. Jason could see he was struggling to decide where to begin and what to explain. Jason had never seen the professor flustered before.

“What about the UFO?” Jason asked, turning to Lily.

“You fell for that?” Lily asked, punching him playfully on the arm. “I can’t believe you fell for that. I thought it was too corny.”

“Smoke machines and wires,” Lachlan replied. “A disco ball and strobe lights, nothing more. Just like Hollywood.”

“And the projector in my bathroom?” Jason asked incredulously, nonplussed at hearing these revelations about a murky world that existed in parallel with what he perceived as reality.

“It’s the only place inside your apartment that’s not under constant surveillance.”

“What? But why?” Jason protested. “Why me?”

Professor Lachlan held up Jason’s research paper, but he was holding up the reverse side covered in Jason’s doodles and speculative calculations.