*
The lights were off inside when we arrived. We all got out of the car, and Jim let himself in through the front door with a spare key hidden under one of those fake rocks. When we were all in the front room, the light came on. Jacob was on his knees in the living room. Blood dripped from his split lower lip, and both of his eyes were ringed with bruises.
“I’m sorry, James,” he said. A policeman in a black uniform of a style I had not seen before stood behind him and held a gun to his head.
“Jacob!” Jim exclaimed, and moved towards his brother. Behind us, another black-uniformed policeman came out of the corner and grabbed Jim by the arms before he could advance further. Another came from the other corner and grabbed Penelope, and a third grabbed me. I started to struggle, but then realized it was pointless. We were trapped.
Dr. Boggs stepped out of the shadows from the dark kitchen. Now I realized why he had not pursued us; he had known exactly where we were going. The helicopter we had heard was them flying over and arriving at the house well before we did, with enough time to rouse Jacob and get him into position ready to surprise us when we walked in.
He held a gun in his red-gloved hand, just as I had seen. I had been trying to get far away from him, but we had gone right where he wanted us, right where he knew we would.
“You’ve caused quite a lot of trouble, Mr. Well,” Dr. Boggs said, smiling a doctor’s broad, benevolent smile. “All I wanted was to make you better.” He lowered the gun. “I wanted to help you.”
“I’ve seen how you help people,” I said, pointing to Jacob and his injured face. I told him of the dead man we had seen on the side of the road, and of the murder of the man who was only opening his door to a knock. I told him I knew about the multiple floors underground at Maple Ridge where he kept the people who were inconvenient to him.
“Those are sad things,” he said, appearing to consider the murders, the kidnappings, and the imprisonment in an academic way, with a far-off expression in his eyes. “But sometimes sadness is necessary. Pain cannot be helped, not when it’s for the good of us all.”
“It appears to have been all for nothing, in any case,” the doctor continued. “Perhaps I underestimated the danger you posed to me. After all, you’ve still walked right into this; your considerable paranoia appears to have been no help to you.”
I noticed Mr. Hodge had gone down Jim’s back and was now working his way around the edge of the room, using the thick 70’s-style carpeting and the shadows of the furniture as cover.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, trying to buy time for Mr. Hodge.
Dr. Boggs laughed a short, sharp laugh; a single expelling of air from the lungs.
“You can ponder that on your own in the next life, if there is one,” he said. He pocketed his pistol, nodded to one of the men, and turned to leave the room. Then He stopped, and turned back around slowly. “But then, what’s the harm of it?” he asked himself. And then, to me, “You’ll have a bullet in what’s left of your brain soon enough; I don’t begrudge throwing scraps to someone who is dying. I’m not a cruel man, Mr. Well.”
“You’d think someone with such a prodigious paranoia would have figured it out by now, but you haven’t. You and the others like you are all that stood between me and this.” He pointed to one of the black-clad policemen. I noticed now that their badges did not have the normal city or state insignia, but instead had a red fist tinged with gold, on the background of a star.
"Soon I will hold this whole state in my hands," he said, raising his hand up and making a fist. In the light, his fist matched almost perfectly with the badge the policemen wore. “Of course, I did have to put my plan into action a little sooner than I liked because of your escape from your house and your efforts at the hospital earlier, and a few people have become collateral damage because of that.” He moved his arm in the direction of Jacob, and in my mind the image of the man being shot inside his front door slid into view. “It didn’t have to happen this way, you know,” he said. “If you’d both taken your medicine the way you were supposed to, you’d have been oblivious to everything and it would have all been put in place peaceably. However, I’ve had to rush, and that’s when accidents happen. I apologize for this regrettable accident.”
Mr. Hodge exited the cover of the couch and pressed his body low against the floor, moving slowly through the plush carpeting near the wall.
“As it was, Mr. Well,” Dr. Boggs went on, “you were apparently still oblivious, so I needn’t have worried. The outdoor tracking cameras which you know about were one of the first public steps in my plan which has taken years to set in motion, but even after you were off your Psylocybin you didn’t give them any of your mental attention. If you had, we might be standing on opposite sides of these guns tonight. Your noble efforts to rescue the lovely Ms. Hope have blinded your mind to the bigger things going on around you,” as he spoke, my mind flashed back to the military-style trucks which had passed me as I was on my way to Maple Ridge, “and I was able to get it started without any meddling from you, which was a welcome change.”
“I never interfered with anything you were doing,” I said, hoping to keep him talking. I could see Mr. Hodge’s nose poking out from under the armchair from the far corner; now he was behind Dr. Boggs and the policeman holding the gun to Jacob’s head, and I didn’t want either one to turn around and see him.
“Haven’t you?” He said, shaking his head. “Oh, Mr. Well, I truly have overestimated you. You have done much more than you think. The man you killed months ago, the one you’ve since convinced yourself was just a man leaving his house after breakfast to go to work, that man was my lieutenant in this city. He helped organize everything for us here. It was through his skill that we discovered Ms. Hope here suffered from paranoia and got her started on her own Psylocybin prescription.”
Mr. Hodge now crept cautiously out from under the armchair.
“At some point she has obviously stopped taking it,” Dr. Boggs continued, “but for years she was a subdued and happy member of the hospital staff causing no bother to us. The ‘shadowy organization’ you spoke of to the detectives and prison doctors was mine. You felt that you were being watched and followed, and it’s because we were watching you and following you.”
He paused, and seemed to be waiting for some response from me. When I didn’t give him one, he shrugged and said, “But I tire of this long explanation. You are obviously not the mental opponent I thought, and soon you will be gone. Goodbye, Mr. Well. Goodbye, Ms. Hope.” He turned to go back through the doorway, and as he did Mr. Hodge leapt onto his pants and skittered up his leg. Dr. Boggs looked down in surprise, but Mr. Hodge moved with such speed that before anything could be done about it he was on Dr. Bogg’s face and had bitten him on the nose. Such was Dr. Bogg’s consternation at the situation that he swung his fist at Mr. Hodge without considering where Mr. Hodge was, and Mr. Hodge leapt away so that the doctor hit himself in the face with his red-gloved fist and stumbled backwards. Mr. Hodge landed on the shoulder of the Red Fist policeman holding the gun on Jacob, and bit him on the neck. Mr. Hodge’s knowledge of human anatomy was astounding; blood squirted out from the policeman’s punctured jugular vein and splattered an arc on the wall. He grabbed Mr. Hodge and flung him hard to the floor, where the small hedgehog then lay, unmoving.
The policeman clutched at his bleeding neck, and Jacob grabbed the gun from him. The men holding us reached for their own guns. When they released us to go for their guns, we dropped to the floor. Although one was able to get his gun unholstered and fire off a single shot, Jacob was too fast for them; all three went down under the heavy weight of a bullet. The one who fired the shot had been lucky (as lucky as a man who has just been fatally wounded can be); even though he had no time to aim and had fired wildly, his bullet had struck Jacob.
Dr. Boggs stood in the kitchen doorway, astonished by the scene. Jacob’s stomach was bloody, and his shirt was torn by a single hole. The police
man Mr. Hodge had bitten had collapsed on the floor, in a red circle of glistening carpet. He moved, but weakly and slowly; his blood coated the walls. The other three lay on opposite sides of the front door, against blood-streaked walls. One was dead, shot in the heart; another in the head; the third was struggling to breathe through a punctured lung and would soon be dead without medical attention.
My head ached, and an image of Dr. Boggs leaving, unharmed, through the back door of the house flashed into my mind.
The doctor, seeing that the tables had turned and all his dinnerware had spilled onto the bloody floor, turned and ran through the doorway into the kitchen.
I grabbed a gun from one of the fallen men beside me and fired into the darkness, and Dr. Boggs screamed in return, followed by the sound of breaking glass. I reached through the doorway and turned on the light. A trail of blood had dripped across the floor and out the broken window; he was gone.
I turned my attention back to the room. Penelope was holding Mr. Hodge, and he stirred in her hands. Jim knelt next to Jacob with his arms around him. Then I realized that he was holding him up; Jacob didn’t have the strength to remain upright.
“I’m sorry, little brother,” Jacob said.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” Jim said.
“I’m sorry this is the last time I’m going to see you, James.”
I picked up the phone and tried dialing for an ambulance, but the line was dead. Jim looked at me, and I shook my head.
“Don’t say that, Jacob! You’re going to make it. Oscar has called for an ambulance, they… they’ll be here soon.”
Jacob shook his head. “You know I can tell when you’re lying.” He smiled, weakly. “Thanks for trying, though.”
“At least Mr. Hodge is safe,” Jacob said. “You’ll have him when I’m gone.”
“Please don’t say that. I can’t take it. Don’t leave me. Tell me you’ll never leave me!” Jim pressed his face against Jacob’s shoulder and began to cry. Jacob lifted one of his arms up and put it on Jim’s back to console him.
“I’ll never leave you, little brother,” Jacob said. Then his arm slid down Jim’s back, and his head sagged forward. Jim held his dead brother in his arms, and wept.
Penelope looked at me and motioned towards the front door.
“We should go, Jim,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder, which shook as he sobbed.
“I can’t leave him,” he said. “He said he’d never leave me.”
“Jim, if we don’t leave this room now,” I said, softly, “we’re never going to get another chance.”
I gently loosened his arms from around Jacob’s body, and helped him to his feet. Penelope handed Mr. Hodge to him, and he put the hedgehog in his pocket. Jim seemed barely able to walk, and I supported him as we walked out the door. Penelope followed, after collecting the guns from the dead men.
Our car was still outside, untampered with. Dr. Boggs must have not thought it necessary, since he wasn’t expecting us to be coming outside again.
A searing pain shot through my head accompanied by the image of all three of us lined up against a wall with our hands cuffed behind our backs, and I pulled Jim and Penelope down behind the car with me, just before a van drove down the road, slowly. Once it had passed, we got in the car and left Jacob’s house.
I found a road out of town that they had missed blocking, and we took it. We passed a burning house. Behind us, the night sky was lit up by more burning buildings deeper in the heart of town. It seemed that Dr. Boggs was taking out his anger on everyone else. We sat in the car in silence, speeding away. Mr. Hodge snuffled quietly inside Jim’s shirt. Jim looked ahead with a blank expression. I didn’t say anything to him; I knew only time could help.
Penelope moved over against me and leaned her head against my shoulder, just like on the ride away from Maple Ridge, but everything had been different on that ride. We were riding to freedom then, but now we were riding away from death.
I put my arm around Penelope, and we drove on.
Epilogue
I am at the end of this journal. If you’re reading this now, then you already know of the things that have happened, because they have happened. That is the most important thing for me. I now know that I do not have a mental disorder. I was not crazy. I was being followed. The man I killed was not an innocent citizen as I was led to believe by the court and the prison and the hospital and even my friends; he was the architect of my town’s demise, which went on to happen even after his death.
Somehow, my mind led me to him, and it has led me through all the tribulations since then. Instead of a mental disorder, there is something else different about my mind. I don’t know how to explain it, for I don’t yet know what it is. In the end, it has helped me escape, and helped my friends escape with me. I have learned to trust my mind.
It is true that we suffered losses in the course of our escape, but so have we inflicted losses on our enemies in turn. Their losses were greater in number, but ours were dearer to us.
You don’t need any proof, though; you don’t need this record of the things that have happened, because you have lived through them. I don’t know how you got this journal. Perhaps you are now living in the abandoned lot where I intend to bury these pages. Or perhaps you were digging a grave for a loved one, killed in the early days of the occupation the Army of the Red Fist. On the radio, I have heard of the jailings and murders which happened during the occupation protests that necessitated those graves.
After that, there was nobody left to protest, not even when the Red Fist started grabbing the mentally ill and holding them without any kind of trial or charge. I’ve heard of all kinds of experiments and torture being carried out by Dr. Boggs, but I don’t know what is true or false. For now, we can’t go back to the town, it’s too dangerous.
It’s even possible that you are our enemy, and that this journal has somehow fallen into your hands. In that case, it hasn’t told you anything you don’t already know. I know you are searching. You will not find us – we will find you.
I have started making my own orange juice. I am not powerless as you imagined me to be; I am powerful. I have adapted. Every day, I tip back a cold glass of juice and let the pulpy liquid pour into my mouth. I drink it up. It tastes sweet.
The End
I’m a self-published author, which means everything you see before you is entirely from me, including writing, proofreading, editing, interior design and cover design. I don’t have a big publisher behind me providing marketing dollars, fur coats, or even a single bottle of champagne. The hardest thing for me to do is get word of my writing out to new readers, so if you enjoyed this book, it would be fantastic if you left a rating or review with your favorite retailer or book review site to help guide somebody else to enjoying it too.
Facebook.com/jonathandavidjacksonwrites is my Facebook address, if you’d like to see what I’m writing next and get a slow drip of updates to satisfy your craving. Sometimes I post pictures of my real human face there to disprove the rumors that I am a dog woof woof woof. Like and follow me because that makes my number of followers go up, and I like that number.
You can also ogle my website, jonathandavidjacksonwrites.com where I write a swell blog of essays, books reviews, and complaints about the world.
If you’d like to tell me something or ask me anything, please email me at
[email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for your time, and I look forward to writing more for you. Now turn the page for a special preview of the sequel to this book, The Quest for Truth!
Jon-David Jackson
A Preview of The Quest for Truth
penelope came to join me at last, interrupting my reverie. I saw from the position of the sun that I had been up several hours, longer than I’d thought.
“We’re ready for our test run,” she said. “We need you for that.”
I went with her to the other side of the oasis where
she and Jim (and perhaps Mr. Hodge, although he is less useful in constructing large things) had set up what appeared to be an obstacle course or a poorly designed maze.
“What is it?” I asked, prepared to joke that it was poorly designed if she said it was a maze.
“It’s our Paranoia Inducing and Soothing Zone,” she said, “version zero-point-five.”
“Point five?” I didn’t know if I was ready to go in such a zone that was only half finished. Also I was displeased that she had spoiled my joke.
“Well, it’s finished… mostly. We won’t really know for sure until you’re in it, though. You’re the final piece. When you’re in there it’ll go up to point eight at least. Then we’ll work out any bugs and Mr. Hodge will eat them.”
I entered the Soothing Zone, as I preferred to think of it. From my point of view it looked like the start of a maze. On either side of me stood walls that were mostly solid, made from the large, leafy branches of the various oasis trees. Ahead I could see that the path diverged in a T shape.
I walked forward, not knowing what to expect. At the junction, I looked both ways. They seemed to be the same, so I went left, because that’s usually a good choice.
As I walked along, a branch sprang out of the wall and smacked me in the face, knocking me to the ground. It was one of the leafy ones so I wasn’t badly hurt, but I was certainly surprised.
“Sorry!” called Penelope from the other side of the wall.
I got to my feet. Rubbing my injured face, I looked around. It wasn’t apparent which branch had hit me, because the whole wall was made of similar-looking branches. How many more of the branches were aimed right at my face?
As I stood there cautiously pondering, I had a familiar aching feeling in my brain. I knew that this was how many of my paranoid feelings started. I could feel it at the base of my skull, at my brain stem. It was like a pressure which would build up until it could not be contained there anymore, and would then spread to the rest of my brain and take over.
The ache intensified and I had a vague image in my mind of a branch swinging out at me again. My tender face was enough of a deterrent that I didn’t want that happening again, and I dropped back down to the ground, on my stomach.
The ground was rough and mounded, and although there were branches along the ground as well it didn’t seem as if any of them could have been rigged to hit me because of the uneven surface. Pleased with myself for figuring out a way around the trap, I crawled forward, using my arms to pull myself along.
A sack of earth and sand flew over the wall of branches and landed in front of me, exploding as it hit. The dirt settled over my head and upper body, and the gritty sand stung my face. Luckily I’d had the presence of mind to close my eyes and so I was not blinded for life.
I wiped some of the dirt and sand from my face with my dirty, sandy hands, and thought about what I should do next, what would be the best way past everything, and why I was in this ridiculous maze being hit by bags of sand.
I reached a decision. I stood up and smashed through the wall of branches, towards where I had heard Penelope’s voice from. I stood in front of her, with leaves falling around me. Below the grime, my face was red from indignation and a little bit of anger.
“What is this supposed to be?” I asked her. “Did I come all the way out here in the desert to be hit in the face by trees and covered with dirt?”
“Calm down, Oscar,” she said.
“I’m not going to calm down. Look at my face!” I said, pointing to my face. She looked, but seemed unimpressed.
“Alright,” she said, putting up her hands in a conciliatory way, “it was a bad idea for you to go in without knowing what to expect, although that was kind of the point.”
“What was the point? What’s it all about?”
“Ok, I guess it’s not going to work without telling you. Basically, we’ve designed this so that it will make you paranoid. There are traps, surprises, maybe even a bear.”
“A bear?”
“And the idea,” she went on, “is that we’ll figure out exactly what makes you paranoid. Sometimes your amygdala lights up because of a genuine threat like Dr. Boggs is launching a missile at us, but sometimes it’s a false-positive, like about your orange juice.”
“A bear, though?”
She sighed. “There’s not really a bear, I was just trying to slip that in without you noticing so maybe you’d think of it later and be paranoid.”
“Anyway,” she said, “what can we learn so far? What did you experience?”
I bent down, picked up a branch, and whacked her in the face with the leafy end of it.
“That, except hard enough to knock me on my ass.”
She held a hand to her slightly leafed face and looked at me reproachfully. Then, her eyes lightened.
“You’re right, Oscar, and I deserved that. You’re not just some experiment for us to knock about. We just got a little excited that we might be onto something that could help you and all of us.”
Jim came around the corner and asked, “How did it go—” but I cut him off by pointing the branch at him and shaking it so that the leaves rustled menacingly. He stopped, and raised his eyebrows. I wasn’t upset anymore, but I didn’t want to waste the rare opportunity to threaten someone with a branch. I took a step towards him and shook the branch again. He put his eyebrows back down and walked away.
“Alright,” I said to Penelope, when we were alone again, “here’s what happened. After I got hit in the face by that branch, I got the headache—”
“I know the one,” she said, interrupting. “Let’s call it something else, though, when we’re talking, so we know it’s not just a regular headache. How about ‘paranoia panic’? That’s catchy.”
“How about just ‘paranoia headache’, then? I wasn’t in a panic.”
“Ok, but it’s not as catchy.”
“I got the headache, and then I got a picture in my head of another branch swinging out to hit me.”
“Really? Another branch?”
“Another branch.”
“But we didn’t even have any other branches ready to hit you with,” she said. “I was already holding the bag of sand, ready to surprise you. That was the whole idea, because we didn’t want you to get used to one thing.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to get used to branches hitting me in the face anyway. I’m just saying that I felt worried about another branch.”
“It seems like your paranoia isn’t something that can really show you what’s going to happen in the future, then. Your amygdala only works with the information it already has, and based on that information it suspected a branch.”
“I don’t know—” I started to say.
“Trust me, Oscar. This is a finely tuned machine.”
“But you said it was only version oh-point-five.”
“After this first run, I’d say its point six at least.”
“I think we need more data. You’ve hit me in the face with a branch, thrown some dirt on me, and you think that’s enough to go on?”
She didn’t reply right away. The inside corners of her eyebrows moved together, and I saw that she was thinking.
“You’re right,” she said after a while, and smiled.