Hey Jude

My eighteenth birthday was a Wednesday and, as my two whole friends were both still in high school, I didn't have much planned until the afternoon. Not much planned besides sleeping in, that was, as I'd taken the day off work.

The first part of my plans was officially destroyed when there was a knock on the door at seven thirty in the morning. I squinted groggily at the wall and strongly considered ignoring it. Neither Mikey nor Finn were foolish enough to decide that a good birthday gift would be an early morning wake up, and there was nobody else who I actually cared to speak to most of the time. The urge to just pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep was strong.

It was curiosity, in the end, that got me staggering up to go and answer it. Not many people knew where I lived, and of those who did only Mikey and Finn had ever come to visit me. If I didn't answer it I'd just lay awake wondering.

I didn't bother putting any more clothes on, though. If someone wanted to knock on my door at seven thirty in the morning on my birthday, fuck 'em, they were getting me in my boxers.

I immediately regretted that when I opened the door and came face to face with a young man who was considerably better dressed than I was. Though his outfit consisted of jeans, work boots, and a T-shirt, all very practical, they looked new and expensive. He barely glanced at me, but I could tell he was unimpressed.

He narrowed his icy blue eyes at me just slightly. "You should put some clothes on."

There was something in his voice, something serious and purposeful, and it made me look at him more carefully. His eyes were his distinguishing feature and the clothes were a distraction, but the closer I looked the more I realised I recognised him. Last time I'd seen him, he'd been dressed much more formally and his eyes had been hidden behind dark sunglasses.

His general shape was more or less the same, though his muscles were more visible in a T-shirt than they had been in a suit jacket. His hair was shorter, but still the same dark brown. It was his broad cheeks and prominent nose that had nudged the memory to the surface, though. He had a distinctive face. I wondered where his boss was. I wondered where Zion was, and if this man knew.

"What do you want?" I asked him after far too long of just staring at him in shock. While in my underwear. Good look.

"Mr McCartnnon has sent me to get you," the man said with a cold smile. What was his name? Was it Brandon? Fuck it, if it wasn't, it was now.

"For what?" I asked.

Brandon, the bastard, was silent, his lips spread in that infuriating smile.

I was tempted to slam the door in his face, just to spite him, and damn the consequences. The potential repercussions weren’t why I resisted the urge, though. If they knew where Zion was, what had happened to him, if he was okay... I needed to know.

So I did slam the door in the guy's face, but not before telling him to "Wait here," and then got dressed just as he had instructed. From the smug look on his face when I opened the door again, I was fairly sure he knew he had me by the balls. I couldn't say no to any chance of finding Zion again, or at least finding out if he was okay.

Brandon had a painfully nice car. Painful because I hated the guy, and guys I didn't like shouldn't have been allowed nice thing.

"Where are we going?" I asked as I did up my seatbelt, but he just smiled some more.

As he drove, I contemplated just how unlikely it was that they had coincidentally decided they wanted to see me on my eighteenth birthday. So, assuming it wasn't an insane coincidence, why might they have wanted me to be eighteen? For moral reasons? Legal? He had locked my passenger side door, I noted, and did my best to stay calm. I had a feeling he would have enjoyed it if I freaked out.

We were heading towards bushland, though in the opposite direction from where I did trail breaking. I wasn't familiar with the geography of the land up this way. I had a good sense of direction, though, so if I somehow found myself lost in the middle of the bush I was pretty sure I could find my way out.

What concerned me more was potentially fighting this guy. As last time I saw him he’d taken up a guarding position, I could only assume he had some kind of combat training.

I wasn't sure whether to be reassured or concerned by the fact that he had yet to make any effort to restrain me. I didn't exactly want to be tied up, but if he did have ill intent it was worrying that he seemed so unconcerned about the possibility of me fighting back. Hopefully he was just underestimating me. Or hey, even better, perhaps I was just being really, really paranoid and these people really just wanted to talk. Maybe, maybe.

The longer we drove, the more nervous I got. Whoever these people really were they had secrets, big ones, and I knew more than they were likely to be comfortable with. Did they somehow know about my encounter with the creature in the bush, too?

But then, they had waited until I was eighteen to do whatever they had planned, and presumably they'd done that for a reason. It had been two years since I'd last seen Zion and months since I'd killed the creature. If they were truly concerned about me knowing too much it was unlikely they would have waited so long. Why would I need to be eighteen for them to kill me?

I had just about managed to calm down and convince myself that I probably wasn't about to get murdered when the car pulled off the main road and into a hidden, overgrown driveway. My heart rate sped up again. Hidden little tucked away place in the bush seemed awfully murdery to me.

Brandon drove slowly to the end of the long driveway, finally stopping when we reached a small brick building hidden amongst the trees.

"Come on," he said as he opened his car door and stepped out.

For a moment I considered refusing to leave the car, but I ultimately had to conclude that if they planned to kill me they weren't going to give up on the idea just because I was uncooperative.

I got out of the car and slammed the door behind me. "What now?"

"Come with me," Brandon said as he turned and headed towards the building.

I stared at his back and didn't move. There was no way I was going into the murder hut. "Is it really in my best interests to follow you?"

He smiled again and damn, that was infuriating. "The man I work for has an interest in you. He knows some things that you might like to know, but the information won't be free. You have to do as I say first."

I stared at Brandon suspiciously for a few seconds, but I was fairly sure he was being truthful. Of course, what he had said had also been extremely vague.

"Information about Zion?"

"About everything." Brandon shrugged. "But sure, if your curiosity really is that narrow, about him. Would you like to know what he is?"

Yes. I wondered if Zion even knew what he was yet. Maybe if I found out from these people I would be able to tell him if I ever saw him again. "What's in the hut?"

That smile again. "I can't tell you that. I can't tell you anything, not until after."

"After what?"

"Another question I can’t answer. If you don’t take this opportunity, Jude, I can’t promise you’ll get a second one," Brandon said. "If you want answers, this is the price. Call it a gamble.”

“Yeah, one where I don’t know the consequences of losing,” I murmured, but this time when he turned and began walking towards the brick building, I followed him.

The first thing I noticed when Brandon opened the door to the hut was that it contained a single, mostly empty room. The second thing I noticed was Brandon's hand on my back, shoving me into the room, and the door slamming shut behind me.

“Hey!” I shouted and slammed my fist against the door, but that achieved nothing but knuckle pain. I went to try the door handle only to find that there wasn’t one. Not on this side of the door, anyway.

My first instinct was to look for exits, so I was quick to notice the complete lack of windows. All the light in the room was coming from the lights on the ceiling. The brick walls inside, I noted, were pitted in a way I hadn't noticed on the external bricks, and the concrete floor had worrying stains on it. A large wooden crate sat in the centre of the room with a smaller box on top of it. The room was otherwise empty.

I'd read something somewhere about teenage boys and risk taking behaviour, and how their brains didn't fully develop until a few years into adulthood so they did a lot of stupid shit. So, yeah, I was blaming that. There was definitely something wrong with my brain that I had ever thought this was a good idea.

"Go and open the box on top of the crate," Brandon's calm voice said through the door. I turned around and glared at the door. There was a small slit in it, presumably so that conversation could take place through it. It was a rather thick door.

"Fuck you, let me out."

"You made your choice."

I kicked the door. "You shoved me in. That's not a choice."

"You're in there now. I'm not letting you out until this is over. Following my instructions will increase your chance of survival."

I inhaled sharply. There it was, then. Whatever was going to happen, I might not survive it. Somehow, though, I still believed what he’d told me. I headed over to the crate and reached for the box on top of it.

Suddenly something inside the crate moved, thumping against the side of it. By the time a screech followed the thump, I was already back by the door. I pressed my body against it as closely as I could, trying to get away from that crate and whatever was inside it. "Okay, time to let me out now. Seriously."

"Get the box, Jude. You had ten minutes from when the door shut. Now you have less than ten minutes."

I grimaced at the crate and stayed put. Whatever was inside had fallen quiet again, but I knew it was in there now. "Ten minutes until what?"

"Until the crate opens. Get the box."

For a moment I considered asking more questions or begging or demanding or screaming, but the cold reality of a deadline focussed me. He wasn't going to let me out regardless of how I asked him, and I had to have been in the room at least a couple of minutes already. Treading as quietly as I could, I went to get the box.

The shrieking scrabble from within when I lifted the box off of the top of the crate gave me the impression that whatever was in the crate, there was more than one of them. Having claimed the box, I quickly retreated back to the door to open it.

There were three things inside: a gun, a spare ammunition clip, and a knife. I wasn't sure whether to feel better or worse about this development. Worse, I decided, when I noticed that the gun was exactly the same kind my father had had when I was a child.

"Why this gun?" I refused to believe it was a coincidence. The knife appeared to be brand new and of high quality, so if these people gave me a shitty gun it seemed unlikely to be a mere coincidence that my father had owned one just like it.

"We stole your mum’s photo album," Brandon said like that wasn't a big deal. "There were pictures of you as a kid with that kind of gun. Do you actually know how to use it, or did your folks just think you looked cute holding it?"

"Yeah," I said, though I wasn't entirely sure, really. I hadn't even held a gun of any kind since I was a kid, let alone fired one. I didn't have enough bullets to mess around with testing my skills, though. I tucked the knife into the band of my pants, put the spare clip in my pocket, and made sure the gun was loaded.

"We'll give you the album back when this is over," Brandon said, and I wondered if he was attempting to offer me reassurance. "Or reverse steal it back into your mum's house. She has terrible security, I swear."

"Do whatever. I don't care."

I eyed the crate for a moment. It was made of wood. My gaze shifted to the gun in my hand. How thick, I wondered, was the wood? The gun I'd been given was rather shitty, but...

I raised the gun.

The sound of the gun when I fired it in the confined space was so loud I physically flinched, but the kick of the gun was gentler than I remembered it being as a kid. I adjusted my grip before taking my next shot. The shrieks coming from the crate told me I'd hit at least one of them. Hopefully it wasn't a crate full of lemurs or something. That would have made me feel pretty bad. Then again, lemurs would have been less likely to kill me when the crate actually did open.

"What did you do?" Brandon shouted with a thump on the door.

I ignored him and kept my eyes on the crate because oh shit, I either broke it when I was shooting it or I broke the rules enough that I no longer got my ten minutes, because the front of it was falling away. Definitely not lemurs.

They did look a bit like monkeys of some kind, though. Well, they would have, if monkeys were reptiles. As monkeys were not reptiles, they mostly looked way too fucking not in a crate anymore.

I had just enough time to contemplate what a useless fucking weapon a gun was in what was very quickly going to become close range combat before the first one flung itself at me and sunk its teeth into my leg. I was very glad I had worn jeans, though that didn't keep its teeth from piercing the skin beneath them. I promptly shot it in the head, causing black blood to splatter over the floor and my jeans. Maybe the gun wasn't so useless.

Useless or not, I immediately dropped it when the next one went for my arm. My arms, unfortunately, were completely unprotected from sharp claws and even sharper teeth. I reflexively tried to yank it off but it bit down harder and dug its claws in deeper. I took the knife from my belt and stabbed at it, being careful to avoid my own arm, until it went limp and fell off. It had probably looked quite funny, me flailing at it while it shrieked around the bit of my arm it had in its mouth.

It was a good thing I had shot the crate, because there were two more of the things, injured, making their way towards me. One had a severely mangled leg but was making good progress on hop-scrabbling in my direction. I quickly kicked the gun away and followed after it to give myself some distance, then picked it up and fired in the direction of the thing until it stopped moving.

The fourth and final reptilian monkey thing was quite badly injured. One of my shots through the crate had managed to hit it in the neck, and it was bleeding badly and really not walking all too well. It was still trying its damn best to get at me, though. It was hardly moving so I could have easily shot it from a distance, but I was too curious not to go closer.

The creepy monkey things didn't actually have scales, but their light brown skin was leathery and wrinkly like an iguana's. The one I was looking at, the last one alive, had given up on walking and was flopped on its side, waving its claws in my direction. They just did not fucking give up.

When I finished the job with a stab to its neck, I was really just putting it down more than anything. It would have died soon enough on its own.

"Are you still alive?" I heard Brandon ask through the door. He didn't sound completely unconcerned, just pretty damn close to it.

"Let me out," I told him flatly. Fear had been washed out of me and I'd been left, for the moment, only with anger.

I heard a mobile phone ring on the other side of the door. "One moment."

His moment wasn't a terribly long moment, less than a minute, which was a good thing because I'd started trying to figure out ways I could use the gun to escape the room. Or maybe just shoot him through the slot in the door. That would have left me locked in the room with no means of escape, of course, but I was pissed off enough that murder sounded like fun.

It was still sounding like fun when he opened the door a few seconds later, and that was why he ended up with my new gun pointed directly at his face.

Brandon stared down the barrel of my gun and did a pretty good job of looking cool, but I noticed when he swallowed thickly. "You're not going to shoot me."

"Oh yeah?" I probably wasn't going to, but I was definitely considering it. Though I could be plenty violent I'd never been murderous before but, well, special circumstances.

"People like you don't just kill people. Not in cold blood."

"Well, how about this. I now know you guys have no problem risking innocent peoples' lives. I know that you were after my friend, and that I haven't seen him since. My blood's not feeling very cold right now."

There was a ripple of fear across his face, but he quickly masked it again. "What do you think will happen to you if you kill me?"

"I don't know what you lot have planned for me if I don't kill you. Playing nice doesn't seemed to have gone too far towards keeping me safe."

"It was a test," Brandon said. "Congratulations, you passed. Don't you want your reward?"

"Reward?" I asked blandly. I had more or less decided not to kill him, but I fully intended to hurt him. A lot. And maybe steal his car. Definitely steal his car. Maybe take his clothes, too, just to be an ass.

"Information," he said. "Aren't you curious about what the hell's going on? Do you even know what your little friend was?"

"Was?" I asked quickly, catching on the word.

He shrugged carefully. "Or is. I don't know. I don't think we ever found him."

He seemed to be telling the truth, which brought me a little comfort. Of course, that didn't mean Zion was okay, but... well, it was something.

"If you come with me I'll take you to my boss and you can ask him all the questions you like," Brandon said.

It was increasingly difficult to hold my gun up and steady, and the slowly bleeding cuts the fucking monkey thing had left on my arm didn't help. Some of them were deep. "Can I just shoot him in the face instead?"

Bizarrely, Brandon's lips quirked up at the edges at that. "No, you won’t be allowed to take the weapons with you. I suppose you could try strangling him, though."

I lowered the gun, though mostly only because I wouldn't have been able to hold it steady much longer. "He'll tell me what Zion is? What all this shit is?"

"He will."

"And he won't try and get me killed again?"

"He wasn't trying to get you killed," Brandon insisted. "If he wanted you dead, you'd be dead. He's glad you survived."

"Answer my question."

Brandon frowned. While he spoke, his eyes remained on my gun where I held it loosely at my side. "I don't know his plans exactly. He doesn't tend to explain himself to anyone. What I do know is that he has no reason to endanger you in such a way again."

"In such a way?" I repeated. I was pretty sure he was being honest, but there were a lot of dangerous gaps.

"He was testing your capacity to deal with dangerous situations, so yes, he definitely plans to put you in danger again," Brandon said. "But there won't be any point in doing that if you don't agree to it."

"And what will happen if I don't agree to it?" I pressed.

"That, I don't know," Brandon admitted. "But whatever it is, running now won't save you from it. Zion may have gotten away from us but, well... you're not him. You're only human."

"You're saying Zion's not human, then?"

He smiled. He knew he'd caught my interest. "Not entirely."

I glared at him.

Brandon shrugged. "That's all I'm saying. If I told you everything, you'd have no incentive to come with me."

I didn't stop glaring. "I could still shoot you."

He sighed and shook his head. He was thoroughly convinced I wasn't going to kill him now. So was I.

"You're really not the killing type," Brandon said. "Well, not the killing humans type, anyway. Good thing that didn't extend to the little demons in there, huh?"

"Demons?" I asked skeptically. Normally I would have assumed such a word was being used as a descriptor rather than a label, but at that point I understood less than jack shit.

He smiled, stepped past me, and started walking away. "I'm leaving now. You can either come with me and find out more, or you can find out how long it takes to walk back to your apartment from here."

I could have hitchhiked back. I also had my mobile phone with me, which I had forgotten when faced with likely death, though it wouldn't have done me much good. I had no idea where I was.

I had options for getting home other than going with him or walking. But... okay, I was curious. Very curious.

I groaned at my own stupidity as I followed Brandon back the way we’d come, outside the building and up to the car.

I was going to be very cross with myself if this whole thing was just another trick and I was, for the second time that day, cooperating in bringing about my own downfall. Of course, I thought grimly as I slammed car door, if things did go wrong I wouldn't necessarily have the opportunity to hate myself.

It was another ten minutes of driving down the highway through the bush before we turned off down a long, surprisingly wide road that cut at a right angle through the trees. We passed a big warning sign that said something about a military base and kept driving.

Soon a tall fence topped with barbed wire came into view. The trees had been cleared around the perimeter so I could see enough to know the fence encircled a large area. Inside the fence there was a large car park, a scattering of sentry towers, a few low buildings and, oddly, a large rocky outcrop in the middle of the base. This blocked my view of part of the base, but I could still see enough to notice the complete lack of any major buildings.

I had been pretty sure these people had lied about being government agents after the whole almost killing me thing, but now I was being taken somewhere clearly marked as a military base. Was our government really so shitty that it condoned things like that?

We stopped at the gate and Brandon rolled down his window to speak to one of the guards stationed there. After a few minutes of conversation, Brandon turned back to me. "Stick your hand out the window.”

"Why?"

He gave me a look of mild annoyance. "Do you really think there's any point in questioning me? I mean, look at this place. If we want something from you, you'll end up doing it whether you like it or not."

When I rolled down the window and stuck my hand outside, it wasn't an act of submission. I just didn't have the enough energy to spare on arguing about stupid shit.

One of the guards took hold of my hand and placed my thumb inside a slot in some kind of hand-held electronic device. A second later I felt something prick my skin. The guard kept a firm grip on my arm and didn't release me until the device emitted two high pitched beeps. I heard another beep and looked over to see Brandon pulling his own hand back into the car.

As my thumb now had a tiny hole in it, sticking it in my mouth to suck the wound was reflexive. It was also stupid, because my hands were not clean at all. I quickly yanked it out as a bitter taste flooded my mouth. I leant out the window and spat, but I couldn't get rid of the flavour. It had an aftertaste of ashes.

"Got their blood in your mouth, huh?" Brandon didn't sound alarmed, so at least I could be fairly sure the blood wasn't poisonous. Well, probably. I wasn't sure how much he cared about whether I lived or died.

"There's a bottle of water in the glove compartment," he said as he started the car moving again.

I found the water and filled my mouth with it before swishing it around and spitting it out the window. I did it twice more before accepting that I wasn't going to be able to stop my mouth tasting like a chimney any time soon.

Unless there were an awful lot of people crammed into the few small buildings, I was fairly sure there were more cars in the car park than there were people in the base.

"You're going to have to leave your weapons in the car," Brandon said once he'd parked, and I realised I still had the gun and the sheathed knife clutched in my lap. I was surprised we'd been allowed through the gate at all when I was so obviously armed.

I considered refusing. The weapons made me feel safe — well, safer — and that was a feeling I was desperately short of. Ultimately, though, I knew I wouldn't be able to escape the base no matter what weaponry I had. If something went wrong, being armed would simply increase my chances of getting shot.

I handed them to Brandon and let him lock them in the glove compartment.

"Will I get them back later?" I asked.

He gave me a critical look. "If you really want them. I mean, the knife's not bad, but that gun is a piece of crap."

I shrugged. "It kills things fine. This world just keeps looking more and more dangerous and having a weapon would make me feel better."

Outside of the car I felt disconcertingly exposed. I was in a huge, open parking lot in the middle of a base full of armed people who might well be perfectly happy to kill me.

"Maybe if you behave Mr McCartnon will give you a machine gun," Brandon said and shot me a smile that wasn't really friendly.

"And if I don't, maybe he'll shoot me with one?"

"Nah," Brandon said with a shake of his head. "He wouldn't do it himself."

With that bit of reassurance Brandon began heading towards the edge of the parking lot with me following close behind. I didn't have any real choice but to follow by that point; running away was no longer an option. I wasn’t sure it ever truly had been.

We were heading towards the rocky outcrop which seemed odd at first, but then we rounded a corner and soon a large opening in the rock with two guards on each side became visible. Okay, so apparently I was going to have to count this thing as a building too. Even taking that into account, though, didn't explain the number of cars and general emptiness. The rocky outcrop simply wasn't that big.

Brandon showed one of the guards his ID, but they seemed to know each other so the action appeared to be little more than a formality. There were gates that could be slid shut to block the entrance but they were open, so a nod from the guard was all we needed to pass through.

Inside it looked a lot like a cave, which was reasonable considering that was exactly what it was. There were lights embedded in the ceiling, but no real effort had been made towards making the ceiling or the walls even and flat.

I followed Brandon into the cave and around a corner in the wide passage. In front of us, at the end of the passage, there was an industrial sized elevator.

"Huh," I said as we headed towards it. That was interesting.

When we reached the elevator Brandon took out his ID card again. A scanner to the side of the elevator beeped when he waved the card in front of it. I tried to memorise the pin he entered, but his fingers moved quickly and it was at least ten digits long. Fuck it. I didn't stand a chance of escaping anyway.

The doors to the elevator slid open, and I took a moment to appreciate just how big of an idiot I was before stepping in.

The buttons next to the door went up to seventeen, and I knew there were no floors above us. Whatever this place was, it went down deep. Brandon pressed the button for floor three, and I silently hoped the lower numbers were the ones closer to the surface. Not that it made any real difference; being trapped deep underground just freaked me out.

The injuries to my arm and leg stung and I had a good bit of blood on me, both my own and that of the creepy monkey things. They were distant worries, though, and had been pushed aside in order to focus more of my energy on a constant contained panic.

When the elevator stopped a female voice announced the floor number, making me startle. Brandon snickered. I was so tense already that I barely restrained myself from hitting him for that.

The walls of the corridor down here were also made of rock, but they had been carefully carved out rather than created from natural formations so they were smooth and flat. As we walked down the corridor we passed by several electronic doors, but aside from them and the lights embedded in the ceiling there wasn't much to look at.

It was kind of cool, honestly, but with everything that had happened I was having a hard time appreciating it. If these guys hadn't been assholes I would have been fascinated by all this and excited to find out more. Instead I was quietly terrified, in need of a good long shower, in slight pain, and incredibly pissed off. I was having kind of a shitty day.

Brandon stopped at one of the electronic doors and pushed a large button located where the handle would have been on a normal door. The door slid open.