Kent Kelly - The Girl Who Bled Forever

(A thin young woman in gray business suit enters, identified as Anna Morgenstern. She was a specialization-unknown protégé recruit from the FBI, which was an Archonate-preceding intelligence organization known then as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She sits at the table, opens a briefcase and proceeds to speak to Subject while staring at her red-banded and classified documentation. A glittering black pistol is situated in the briefcase as well, hidden in the lid yet clearly visible from the vantage point of the camera. The agent does not look up when the soldiers ready their own weapons.)

ANNA MORGENSTERN [hereafter, AM]: Please identify yourself.

CAPTAIN ALAN RAMSEY, USAF [hereafter, CR]: Why did they send you? Where is Doctor Salinger?

AM: Doctor Salinger has been reassigned.

CR: Reassigned. At his request, or was he removed?

AM: I’ll be asking the leading questions here if you don’t mind, Captain Ramsey.

CR: If you know who I am, I don’t need to identify myself, now do I?

AM: A rhetorical question. Don’t ask those either, please.

CR: You’re the nicest interrogator I’ve ever met. I’m not saying that’s wise, or commendable. Or that you’re very good, for that matter.

AM: I don’t think you realize how serious this is, Captain.

CR: I don’t think you do either.

AM: Interesting that you say so with such conviction, but irrelevant. Good morning, by the way.

CR: Morning?

AM: Now. How was the anomaly first detected?

CR: Dive right in, eh?

AM: Indeed. The causal anomaly? How—

CR: Is that what they’re calling it now?

AM: (She looks him in the eye for the first time, but says nothing.)

(Subject leans in and places his bound and bagged hands near to the briefcase’s corner. Behind Subject, one of the soldiers advances, then touches his earpiece and resumes his former position at the ready.)

CR: (Looking into Anna’s eyes, not behind him.) At ease, Thomas. Christ.

AM: He isn’t under your jurisdiction.

CR: Fucking tell me what I don’t know from past experience, not to mention every breakfast from seven years ago. Anyways. Someone at the Academy got an anonymous phone call, disguised voice, but you could hear the fear. No, terror. The terror behind his desperation. Telling us that a girl needed to be saved, that the survival of the entire Earth, the sane “dimensional construct” of existence as we know it, was at stake. Telling us the exact coordinates of the… causal anomaly… down to the longitudinal ten-thousandth of a second. No citizen should be able to measure that precisely, especially in the middle of nowhere over a sub-stratus magnetic anomaly. Someone had military-grade equipment, and probably a not-yet-revoked satellite feed as well.

AM: Please limit speculation.

CR: Why? You know, maybe the magnetic anomaly led to the discov—

AM: Slow down please, Captain. Someone panicked, a phone call, coordinates, speculation. Who? A man, yes? Do you think he was military, retired, or perhaps counter-intelligence?

CR: You reveal a lot, the way you lead your questions.

AM: Who do you think this person might have been?

CR: That’s a little better. Ma’am, I’ve no idea. I sincerely think it was some kind of hardcore amateur, like an ex-mil caver because you know that region by [redacted]… that region, you know, that obsessive streak. He saw what he saw. I don’t think anyone would be out there in the wasted and frozen nowhere of [state and county redacted from the record] for any good non-military reason, you know?

AM: Moving forward, let us presume I don’t know anything.

CR: (Dry laughter.) All right. I can do that. I bet you can, too.

AM: Enough with the attempted humor, please. The call came in, the coordinates, the urgency. What happened when the site was investigated?

CR: It wasn’t.

AM: Sorry?

CR: Air Force Command doesn’t respond to random tips from paranoid citizenry, ex-military or no. The call was logged in case it was a potential threat. It was filed, dumped into the junk stream for the NSA’s keyword shit-scans and forgotten.

AM: You’re implying a data connection between the Air Force and the National Security Agency for some reason.

CR: You catch on pretty quick, doc.

AM: I’m not a doctor.

CR: FBI? CIA? Marshal? What are you?

AM: The first. The call was logged, we’ll get to precisely how you knew that later. Then what happened?

CR: Well, Agent…

AM: Morgenstern.

CR: Well Morgan, someone’s dog out by the rail station at [redacted], near the highway and frontage junction, jumped a fence at night, ran about two kilometers down the railroad tracks, into a crow-field. That fucking mongrel came back to his owner’s front door early the next morning, dragging a surgically severed arm from a female child.

AM: We’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

CR: You need to see the recording of the incident before you can understand. Surely you’ve seen it many times by now.

AM: As part of my… time with you… my supervisors wanted me to review it for the first time with you, and with our four colleagues present.

CR: Christ, they want to watch your reactions? That’s sick. What do you think you’re going to see? Do you even know?

AM: (Silence, a glance. A raising of the eyeglasses between two fingers.)

CR: That’s so fucking sick . What on earth did you pull to get assigned to me? Is this some kind of punishment?

AM: Let’s review the recording, please.

(Anna looks into the recording camera, then slightly to the right.)

(The source video begins. The audio, mostly muted from the original, is overlaid by the ongoing discussion between Anna and the Subject.)

(Black and white daylight, pre-dawn. Glow-touched clouds rise scudding over distant mountains. Crows and less identifiable birds are wheeling on updrafts over a tumbling sea of high gray corn. The wind, which must be howling, is faintly heard.)

AM: Who shot the video?

(Someone is magnifying, refocusing. The blurry corn waves to-ing and fro-ing in wild circles, left to right. Dust clouds gather and fade.)

CR: We don’t know. Consider the secrecy which enveloped this whole thing after the aberration was verified. I don’t know a hell of a lot, except as I was subjected to it through piecemeal orders later on. I know there were marks of a struggle, lots of blood, and marks from a tripod there. Before the rains. And the remnants of the body, of course.

AM: How did you come to procure the video?

CR: It was sent to us, with a newsy note.

AM: Newsy note?

CR: Showing my age here. A piece of paper with text spelled out on it by taped-together letters—

AM: We call that a cryptic composite.

CR: Whatever. The note was tersely worded, since those things are apparently a pain to put together. But it strongly implied that the sender was the earlier caller, or a direct associate of his. That connection wasn’t pieced together until later, but he gave the precise time and date of the original call in writing. That’s non-disclosed outside of Command, of course.

AM: He listed the call that first came in. Which led to pulling the call from logs?

CR: Likely. Sorry, speculation.

AM: Very well, let’s watch.

(As Anna and Subject go silent, a raspy voice is heard. The cameraman. His words are whispering and afraid, almost exultant.)

ANONYMOUS: (A voice much deeper than Captain Ramsey’s, something is broken deep inside.) Oh, my love. Love, love. I’m so, so sorry. (Intake of breath.) I — (Indecipherable.)

AM: What is that?

CR: What do you see?

AM: That flaw in the middle of the film. It’s like… like viewing two sides of a broken window with the crack running down the middle. Wait, no. What is that? Is that sunlight? The sun is barely shining, isn’t risen yet.