The Connection

Sean and Jack meet up with Commander Locke at The Horn to be interviewed on their last mission and the circumstances of Nick's condition. Locke also reveals some intersting information.

          The night was thick with terrors. Men I know, that I knew, that I will come to know, all died last night in my mind. All my efforts were useless as I watched and suffered through the massacre. I have had this dream many times before, waking up screaming in terror and anger. But, at the end of this dream, there was something new. That bright blue bulb maintained a presence in my subconscious, bringing it to a perfect recollection at the end of my dream. That azure glow was not natural, the way it slows down my thoughts and tries to wash them away. It is not peaceful, but calm torture.

          Luckily, I awoke quietly with my slumbering companions still strewn about the room. The window still shows the moon pulling itself across the night sky, but this time in a light purple shade. Connor lies on his side exactly in the same spot he was in last night with his rifle laid next to him. Jake’s snoring has thankfully been silenced thanks to the presence of his own thumb in his mouth. As I begin to devise a plan to slyly escape this room, Capt. Sean awoke as well. With a wave of two fingers, he indicates me to follow him over his bed and to the door of the elevator. With quiet compliance I trail him and watch him push the button for the elevator to open. A streak of light escapes through a crack and hits Tony’s face across the room, causing a moan and slight turn from the rookie. Slipping through what room I had, I shut the door quietly behind me to be greeted by Sean’s steady gaze.

“You did well back there Jack,” says Sean, pushing the button for the first floor.

“It was only getting out of a room sir,” I reply nodding back at the door,

“No, no you miss understand. I meant back in the town and the hospital yesterday,”

“Thank you, sir. I was only doing my job and helping out the team,”

“Right, walk with me to grab some food,”

We emerge back into the main floor with the rows of cots which stand empty as the soldiers prepare themselves for a new day. The sun greets us with a deep orange sunrise that causes the Horn to look like a giant wave of fire coming up from below to engulf us. We go through a pair of sliding doors opposite those that lead to the landing pads and move along the hallway,

“Command is glad with the mission but, when I told them about Nick and the circumstances of his capture, they became tense. Commander Locke wants to meet with you to get the details straight,”

“The commander is here at the Horn?” I ask, recalling how someone of his position should be at HQ, not at the frontier,

“He flew in last night. Since we were not awoken with news otherwise, I assume he made it here. He should be waiting for us in the Mess Hall,”

“Mess Hall, sir? Isn’t that a little, informal?”

“Even commanders have to eat sometimes, Jack,” he answers with a chuckle,

“Plus, when HE isn’t surrounded by his peers or his superiors like you’re used to seeing him, he isn’t that bad of a guy. Here we are,”

We emerge from the first hallway to a Y-shaped corridor where we go right, through another pair of sliding doors into an enormous cafeteria.

          The layout is like looking at a set of giant stairs, with layer upon layer of table-filled floors with food lines stretching along the walls. The only way up and down these tiers are double sets of stairs that are at either end of the mess hall. Starving soldiers scurry from their tables to grab their rationed breakfasts and back to cram as much food as possible into their stomachs in preparation of the long day. The ceiling is made of glass except the steel beams that form a huge grid from which unnecessarily elaborate chandlers hang. My first thought was of the impossible task of finding a single man in this mess until I see a huddle of soldiers at the fourth and top tier not eating, but standing guard around a singular table.

Going up those stairs was quite dangerous with the constant opposing flows of men going from floor to floor. We manage to reach the huddle of men who recognize Capt. Sean and make a hole for us to get to the table. Sitting there is a bald man with a thin scar across his left eye. His chiseled chin gives frame to his round head which houses a wrinkling face. Dark green eyes come up from the oatmeal set in front of them to meet us, bringing along a smile.

“Morning Captain. Morning Sergeant,” says Commander Locke, standing up to shake our hands,

“Good Morning sir,” replies Capt. Sean, far more comfortable than I am,

“Sir,” I say, nodding in respect,

“Take a seat,” offers Locke, pulling out a chair for Sean. We sit on either side of him,

“Let’s get right down to business shall we?” says Locke patting me on the back, getting rid of the professional tension I had expected,

“From what I hear, you had quite the experience Jack. Now explain to me how Nick came to be captured and the details of your escape,”

I brush my hair back, disturbed by the memories I have to recall,

“Well sir, while heading to the top of the hospital where our evac was, Sergeant Connor and I heard Nick’s cry for help as we went up the stairs. Under Captain Sean’s orders, we went back down and proceeded to search for Nick while engaging the enemy. Now….,”

“Son, if you keep trying to talk to me like this is a court hearing, I won’t get the full story. Tell the tale as if you were speaking to a buddy of yours,”

“Very well…uh I mean ok,” I studder. “So after going through a few halls, we came to some sort of office. We found Nick’s weapon in some debris near a wall with a painting on it. The painting turned out to be a switch that revealed a passage behind the wall,”

“A passage you say? My god this is getting interesting,” jokes Locke. I continue with,

“Yea it sure got interesting. We went down the hall to some sort of…operating room. There, we took care of what guards there were and found Nick on the operating table in the middle of the room. They had pugged him full of tubes, coming from his head, his chest, from all over. I was trying to figure out how to get the tube out from his head when he just sat up screaming at the lights. Then he ripped the tube from his head and flung it at the light, causing it to shatter glass all over us. Afterwards we managed to get Nick out of that room by carrying him since he became unconscious again. We met up with the rest of the squad at the evac point once we got up to the roof and then got away”.

The story was a pain to think about. Seeing a man like how Nick was, seeing someone you know in a situation like that, it’s unsettling. Captain Sean nods to Locke, assuring my story was true. The commander continued to eat his oatmeal until he slurped down the last bits, wiping the leftovers from the corners of his mouth. For a moment, I am mesmerized by the man’s wrinkles, how that face had seen so many battles, so much death. Then I thought of what my face will look like when I’m that age, if I make it. The thought of life beyond Delta never occurred to me, looking to the future was to much of a task when the present is always trying to kill you.

Finally, Locke looks up at me and says, “Thank you for that Jack, but there must be more. What you speak of is atrocious of course, but from what the medical team working on Nick says, there must be more. His mind, it’s warped in a way we have yet to encounter, so treatment is difficult. Was there anything else? Anything that might do this to someone?”

When he said “mind”, my thoughts immediately sprung to my dream, of that haunting blue bulb. Of how that glow has somehow stamped its presence in my own mind,

“Yes sir, I do think there is something else. The light that Nick destroyed, it was not normal. I looked at the thing for a minute and last night I had a dream of it. I can’t imagine looking at it for however long Nick did would be good for someone,”

“The light you say,” says Locke, stroking his chin ponderously, “It wasn’t blue was it?”

His question surprises me, “Yes. Yes it was sir, how did you know that?”

“Years ago, we had a squad try to infiltrate a Pacific Corps base in Alaska. That squad was headed by a Lieutenant Rodgers, who was equipped with a kind of prototype camera on his helmet that would be able to transmit visual feeds back to HQ in real time, even from far away. The thing worked flawlessly from what I’ve read, the commanding officers were with him the whole way.

Unfortunately lieutenant Rodgers died that night, betrayed by the intel a Pacific Corps agent had given him. The entire office back at HQ had a first person experience of being shot in the head, made quiet the mess since a lot of those folks were, squeamish. Now whatever folks had the stomachs to review the footage noticed something before the feed had cut out. The bodies of the team were dragged from where they were mowed down to some sort of operating room, kind of like you said. We figured those sick b******s would do some kind of experiments on those bodies so we almost turn off the feed ourselves. That decision was unanimous until we saw something weird. One of the bodies was put on the operating table, in the middle of the room just like you described, and left staring up eyes wide open. The men who brought the bodies in left the room and shut off the lights. Then the feed cut on its own,”

“What cut the feed Dan?” asked Sean, calling Locke by his first name, further establishing their friendship,

“Originally we had no idea, until we reviewed the footage recently. The last few frames showed one of the weirdest things I have ever seen. The lights went off. Then one of the center lights, a bulb, shone a blue color,”

“Just like the one used on Nick!” I exclaim. The fact that the E.A.O knew about the bulb gave me hope that maybe the situation wasn’t as hopeless as it seemed,

“Yes, but that’s not the weird part. We only got the bulb shining for around ten frames, the tenth and final frame had what I was talking about,” Locke smirks at Sean and I, purposely leaving us on the edge of our seats,

“Don’t play with us, tell us what you saw,” says Sean.

“The light shone and that dead body on the table right beneath it, well the body moved,”

Author's Note

ignore grammar problems