The Alien Agenda (20 page)

The roof of the Fede
ral Building was mostly covered by the heliport landing pad.  The landing pad itself, the raised lamps which illuminated the pad, the coiled and unattached buoy cables and the eye bolts protruding from the concrete rooftop.  Like our own home, it had a rectangular roof-access doorway, which was a short distance from the helipad.  There were also the air-conditioning units and vents that all such buildings possessed.  Even as our feet touched the concrete, Sonafi and I were beside the roof-access entrance.

Brid, Volga and Nikita joined me as I tried the door handle.  Not unsurprisingly it was not even locked
though that would have proved no hindrance.  I looked quickly around my small group and then pulled open the door.  I went in without looking back to see who followed.  I plunged down the stair into the fully-lit building. 

The stair had a landing between the roof level and the topmost floor of the building, which separated the two short flights of steps.  As I went down it I noted the camera mounted in the corner at the juncture of ceiling and
walls.  A man watching that camera would not see us pass, but a slow motion replay, depending on the resolution of the recording, might show a blurred glimpse of me or even an entire snapshot of one of us as we passed.  I did not like the idea that we were leaving visual evidence behind but I did not believe we would have the time or resources to find and eliminate the recording which had been made when I was aware that such data would be backed up the moment it was recorded. It was simply something that could not be helped.

The first corridor was empty but well lit.  I had been keeping my mind closed but now I opened it.  Let the sea of sensory input wash around me in its ebb and flow.  There was no one on the topmost floor.  On the next level I found James Ray, along with three others.  James Ray was drugged and incoherent.  His mind a collage of tho
ughts, ideas and concepts shape-shifting and attempting to morph into coherency but unable, due to the effects of the drugs they had administered him.  They weren't wasting any time.  The others I sensed were his questioners and the pharmacologist who had administered the truth serum.  The questioning had not yet begun, but when it did he would not be able to lie or hold anything back.  He was, after all, only Human, and the drugs more than effective.  He would not consciously betray us and I would not have held it against him once he had, under the influence of the drugs.  It was obvious, since he was under the influence of their Truth Serum, that he had not volunteered his knowledge.  As things were, the issue of fault or betrayal would not matter.  We were here.  His interview was about to come to an end.

As the others flanked me, taking up positions to guard me while my conscious mind was mostly elsewhere, I quickly slipped into the pharmacologists mind to see how much time we had and to determine if the doctor was aware of any trap that might have been laid for us, but they were not expecting to be attacked within their own stronghold and in any case there were security personnel manning the street entrance on the first floor.  They were in
violable, they thought.  The Doctor was waiting with a certain amount of professional glee the opportunity to question James Ray.  I did not like what I saw when I looked into his mind.  He was not a nice man.

Following the schematic of the building I found in the doctor's mind, I sped down the hall to the staircase entrance, through the door, down the stairs, and on into the level below.  Sonafi followed me step for step, the others only slightly fa
rther behind.  I knew from the Doctor’s mind that the door to the interrogation room, at least, had been locked but it was too little precaution far too late.  I lowered my shoulder and went through it, snapping the steel lock as if it were a dry twig.  The door exploded inward and I went in with it.

What I saw in that first moment, when I saw James Ray strapped in a chair, with his tw
o interrogators and the good Doctor hovering over him, and his battered condition, decided me then and there that these Humans did not deserve to live.

James Ray was not young but that fact had not been taken into consideration.  The beating had not occurred with any thought that James Ray would talk.  The drugs would make him talk.  These were Humans who did this for a living
but more so for the personal enjoyment.  The beating had been merely to amuse.  James Ray would now have no place among mainstream humanity.  He would be hunted whether he was Human or Vampire and so there was no further reason to withhold his request.

I reached and took the pharmacologist first.  He was nearer the door, cleaning implements on a tray
.  With one hand I reached out and snapped his neck, even as Sonafi rushed past me and attacked the two interrogators.  A quick flick of her right hand crushed one’s larynx even has her left reached to snatch the second from his feet.  Then did for the remaining interrogator time return to normal.

The stunned Human found himself dangling above the floor in Sonafi's merciless grip.  He was taller than she, Sonafi is after all only a tiny thing, and his feet barely cleared the ground at the full extension of her arm, but he had an immediate sense of the power of the being into whose clutches he had somehow fallen, and he did not struggle.  I know that if it had not been for the door hanging from one hinge at a cockeyed angle, the thunder of its having been smashed
open, it would have seemed as if we had materialized out of thin air.  Still it did not seem possible and his eyes bulged at the incredibleness of the situation. 

“Marcel!”  James Ray said groggily as his drugged mind slowly became aware of my presence. He had a dreamy, ethereal look on his face that told of his befuddled state.

“We are here.”  I told him.  Then I turned to Sonafi and the Agent dangling from her grasp while the others moved to release James Ray his bonds.  The Agents eyes bulged even further as I approached him, if that were possible, but he had the sense not to struggle or attempt to get away.  That would not have been possible.

The FBI Agent was a telepath.  That was why Sonafi had not killed him outright.  He was not powerful, as compared to a Vampire, but Humans in general were becoming more telepathic as time passed.  As the
Others continue to add their DNA to the Human gene pool.  Time seemed to pass so quickly that sometimes I did not notice how drastically they were changing.  There were short periods when Humans with pronounced, obvious features of the Others appeared, as the Others' DNA was installed in humans, then longer periods as those traits were slowly dissipated out into the general public.  Here was a Human whom I was sure was the product of a recent genetic interference.  There were so few Humans with pronounced telepathic abilities of any level, but he was extraordinarily strong, for a Human.

'What are you?'  The Human spoke directly into my mind.  'I know you can hear me.'

'Your worst nightmare!'  I told him, but I was going through his mind, poring over his memories.  We were the first real telepaths he had ever met.  This was his first real mind to mind communication.  He had been able to look into the minds of other Humans but never communicate with them. Not telepathically.  'This is new to you.'

'I knew you would hear me!'  He thought/said.  'I have never felt a mind so clear and open!  What are you?'  He asked again.

His telepathy was strong for a Human, but not so strong that he had been able to delve into James Ray's mind, unopposed.  He had tried and James Ray had resisted.  The years of his acquaintance with Vampires had given James Ray the rudimentary ability to close his mind to telepathic intrusion.  The drugs had not been, I now saw, to loosen his tongue, but to loosen his mind.  That this weak Human telepath might the more easily see into its depths.  There was no question that under these drugs James Ray’s mind would have been as easy to read as an open book by this Human telepath.  This Agent Curt Travis Irving, Federal Bureau of Investigations Special Services Sector, Branch 279.

Chapter 17

Branch Two Seven Nine!

“An entire FBI Sector devoted to us!”  I said. 
“Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people!”  I said
us
because the FBI did not yet distinguish between Vampires and the Others.  They did not understand there was a distinction, and even if they understood the distinction, what would it mean to them?  We are just a different form of the Others.  In our own way as bad, or worse, depending on how you look at it.  The only advantage to knowing a distinction existed would be that they could, by watching us, learn more about the Others, for the little good it would do them.  Humans were constrained by the same technological boundaries as we were.  To answer Curt Irving, I said; “We are Vampires.”

“Shall I put him down?”  Sonafi asked contemplatively, as if he were a bug on a pin stuck to a board.  He certainly had no more say in the matter than that bug in question.

“May as well.”  I said, though I wasn't sure yet where this might go.  What we might gain by letting him live.  She let him go and he stumbled backward before catching his balance. 

“Vampires!”
  Curt Irving said.  Whatever he had been expecting, this was not it.  Aliens.  Extraterrestrials.  Martian men.  Any of these answers would have been received with frank acceptance, but not this.  Not that we were Vampires.

“Yeah Vampires!”
  Sonafi said sharply.  Then turning to me; “We're wasting time.  What we going to do with him?”  She jabbed a thumb in Irving's direction and he visibly blanched.  In Irving's mind had been the dream, spawned by movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and their ilk, that if he ever encountered the Others, he would ask them to take him with them, but the last thing he would dream of doing is to ask the same of us.  The last thing he had been expecting us to announce was that we were Vampires.  He did not understand, of course.

I opened my mind and let all of my memories pour into his head.  I had never attempted to do this in quite the same way before.  I did not have to force my memories into another Vampire
’s mind, but Curt Irving was not another Vampire and he did not know how to get into my alien mind.  To do this I had to raise each memory and then push it into Irving's mind.  There was no resistance.  He was receptive.  He was just inexperienced.  He thought he had been the only telepath of his power in his world until only minutes ago.  When I was finished, he stood there in shock trying to absorb it all, but absorb it all he would.  He already understood enough to change his whole conception of the struggle which had been occurring right under their noses, yet which they had been blind to.

“We thought their intentions must be benign!  They have never given us any reason to think otherwise.”  Curt said.  “We had no idea.”

“It is hard to imagine.”  I agreed.

“What do you think you are going to do?”  Sonafi asked.

“Maybe make an ally.”  I said.  I had given him memories which stretched all the way back to the very beginning.  I showed him how we lived.  That we were social animals who valued family life, though I had not shown him how few of us might claim that status.  I also had not shown him what I had been like in the beginning or that some Vampires were still.  His high telepathic ability told me that the Human race was drawing desperately closer to the final fulfillment of the Other’s plans.  The world had not ceased to spin, the machinations of the Others put on hold, merely because I had withdrawn myself and refused to acknowledge it.  The issue would not resolve itself.

“You're letting him live!”  Brid exclaimed, but his surprise was tinged with calculation.

“Yes.”  I said.  The pharmacologist had been an evil man.  He had plied his trade for far too long.  He had begun to enjoy it.  It may have been that he had enjoyed it from the beginning, who knows and it was now too late to know.  The interrogator Sonafi had already killed was a pro.  He had done this for a living.  I felt no remorse for him whatsoever.  Agent Irving was a different story.  He was a Federal Agent called in because of his unique abilities, for this one case.  James Ray was the first subject ever captured in connection to their investigations into the Visitation phenomena “We're going to let him go.”

I turned to Curt Irving; “We are on the same side!”  I said.

“We have a common enemy, I'll concede.”  Irving said.  I had to give him his due.  He stood there and looked me straight in the eye.  As far as he was concerned, we could be allies, for now.  What happened after, if and when there was an after, could and would be decided then.

“That's acceptable to me.”  I said, accepting the unspoken agreement.

“How do I contact you?”  Irving asked.

“You don't.”  I told
him.  “I'll get a hold of you.”

We left him then and returned to the roof.  We could only move as quickly as our slowest member.  James Ray.  When we got to the roof we were confronted with another problem.  James Ray is a big man.  His weight was not the issue, but his bulk.  I did not think I could pick him up and make the leap back to the closest building
without hurting him.  Human bodies were not designed to handle the kinds of stresses such an impact would incur.  I climbed out upon the wall and bade James Ray to climb down onto me, between myself and the wall and shortly we were upon the ground.

When we
reached the ground Sonafi took James Ray from me and threw him over her shoulder and carried him flitting between the buildings.  There had yet been no alarm raised by the time we reached Brid's car and we were quickly headed for the Interstate.  A few minutes later we were within the anonymity of the busy early evening traffic and no more distinguishable than any of the other hundreds of cars and trucks around us.  We had escaped undetected.