Hey Jude

The floor McCartnnon took me to next was floor five, and it had actual people on it. I had been beginning to wonder where everyone was; the base had seemed so empty in the limited glimpses I'd gotten of it. I only saw a few people, but it wasn't like corridors were natural hang-out spots. I spotted a few on their way elsewhere, some stopped to chat where their paths had intersected. There were probably more people in the actual rooms, but the doors were all shut and lacked windows for me to peek through.

Everyone we passed eyed McCartnnon warily as he walked by, shifting closer against the wall to get well out of his way. They didn’t seem in the least bit reassured by the smile he offered them. It was a predator's smile, showing too many teeth.

McCartnnon stopped outside a door, scanned his card, and typed in his PIN. The door slid open.

The room resembled a doctor's office in some ways. There was an examination table against one wall and a sink next to it, a set of scales, and a few health related posters on the walls. The rest was neutral — two bookcases filled with books and a few interesting knick knacks, a desk and, sitting behind the desk, a woman with blonde hair tied back into a ponytail. She looked annoyed and I immediately liked her. Most people around here seemed too scared of McCartnnon to show him any emotions besides fear and obeisance.

"There's a buzzer," the woman said. She was around a decade older than me and neatly but simply dressed. Her skin was pale and lacked any signs of a tan, and she wore no makeup or jewelry. She was the first straightforward-looking person I'd been presented with today. "I could have had someone in here. I would appreciate it if you'd give some respect to the privacy of my patients."

"I'm their boss, they have no need for privacy from me," McCartnnon said. Apparently that was intended to close the topic, because he placed a hand on my shoulder and pushed me forward. "This is Jude, he will be working here now. Please see to his injuries. Jude, I will go and get your contract now. Stay with Sal until I return.”

He let go of my shoulder before I could shove his hand off, then turned and exited the room, leaving me alone with the doctor. Well.

"Bastard," I murmured at the now closed door, just to get my feelings out there. I turned back around to find the doctor watching me curiously.

"I'm Sal," she said. Her voice was less hostile with McCartnnon gone. "It's nice to meet you, Jude."

“Yeah, you too,” I said, though I hadn’t had enough time yet to be sure if it was nice to meet her or not. Everything in this place was suspect.

"Well, let's take a look at your—" Sal began to say, but then the door buzzed. It buzzed two more times at regular intervals, and then multiple times erratically, like a child playing with a doorbell.

With a roll of her eyes and an apologetic look in my direction, Sal went to open the door.

I noticed the guy's broad grin and his long, bright red hair immediately, but after that my attention was wrenched straight to his eyes. They were light grey and had no visible pupil. At first I thought he was blind, but then I noticed something moving in each eye. His pupils were there, but a fog kept churning and shifting across them.

I realised that I was staring, and that he was staring back. He didn't look impressed. I was embarrassed — I didn't know what was going on with his eyes, but it was like I'd been caught staring at some kind of disfigurement. Only that wasn't the case at all. His eyes were strange, absorbing, a bit like a lava lamp. They weren't ugly. I was staring again.

"Wiley, this is Jude," Sal said. "McCartnnon just dumped him here. Looks like he's newer to all this than I realised."

"Yeah," I mumbled, raising a hand to rub at the back of my neck as I forced my eyes away from Wiley’s. "Sorry. Today’s been hell."

"You have better injuries than I do," the guy, Wiley, said, holding up a couple of grazed fingers. He seemed to have gotten over my rudeness.

Sal scoffed. "You came all the way down here for that?"

"Hey, one of these is my trigger finger."

"Sure," Sal said. "I think you just missed me."

"No way, I have all kinds of hard work I need to be doing."

Sal smiled, her eyebrows lifting skeptically. "Isn't it your day off?"

Wiley grinned back. "Hard work. All kinds."

I shifted awkwardly, feeling like I was interrupting something even though I'd been there first. I didn't really have any choice but to stay, though. Even if I hadn't needed to get my wounds treated, I had no idea how to get around this place. I just wanted to go home.

Sal turned back to me. Her smile softened into something that was no less real, but which held an edge of concern. She seemed to realize I was uncomfortable. "So you're new to all this, right? Do you know what a healer is?"

I remembered, then, that McCartnnon had said he would take me to see their healer. I'd assumed he was simply using the word as a synonym for doctor.

"I know what the word itself means, but maybe not in this context."

"I guess Wiley can go first, then, so you can see how it's done."

"Yay," Wiley said, and walked across the room to hoist himself onto the examination table.

Sal shook her head, but there was a wry smile on her face. "You have a grazed finger. I think you could have managed to stand while I fixed it up."

"I have two grazed fingers," Wiley reminded her. "Damn, what kind of a shitty healer are you, anyway?"

She ignored him. "Jude, come over here and watch this."

All Sal brought over to treat the wound was a single antiseptic wipe, so I was kind of wondering what kind of magic she was going to do with that to actually make this something I needed to witness. And then she did do some magic. Not with the wipe, though.

Wiley extended his hand, palm up, and Sal held her hand, palm down, a few inches above his injured fingers. A few seconds passed before I noticed an eerie blue glow covering Wiley's skin, emitted from Sal's palm. All I could think about was how cool that would look in the dark. Sal withdrew her hand after a couple of seconds, and Wiley quickly removed the blood on his skin with the antiseptic wipe. He held up his hand and waggled five perfectly undamaged fingers.

"Huh," I said. Well, that was weird. I'd had a heavy dose of weird already, though, so I was having a hard time finding it too shocking. "What does it feel like?"

"Warm," Wiley said as he hopped down off the examination table. "Tingly. Kind of itchy, especially with bigger injuries."

"It won't hurt," Sal reassured me. "Unless you have any objections, can you please roll the leg of your jeans up and climb onto the table."

I had absolutely no objections to magical healing, so I did as she'd instructed. I wondered if she'd seen the blood on my jeans or if she could somehow sense injury.

My jeans had given my legs a degree of protection that my arms hadn't shared, which meant that my leg wound wasn't as bad as the damage my arm had taken. I had earned the deep scratches on my arm when the demon had dangled from it, desperately flailing, tearing into me with its claws. At least clotting had kicked in and the bleeding had stopped.

"Arm or leg first?" Sal asked, and, when I shrugged, decided for me. "Arm, then."

The damage to Wiley's fingers had been minor, and most of it hidden by blood, so I hadn't actually seen the healing process. Up close, on the deep wounds on my arm, it was easy to see as the skin tugged back together, mending flawlessly.

It felt just as Wiley and Sal had described: painless, warm, tingly, and itchy like a healing wound. Which made sense, really, because healing wounds were exactly what they were. When she was done she wiped the blood from my arm, revealing perfectly intact skin beneath.

Wiley had leant back against Sal’s desk and was idly watching her work. "How did this happen, anyway?"

"Me, four monkey demons, a small room with a locked door, a knife, and a gun," I summarised for him. "Surprise showdown entrance exam to something I never wanted in the first place. I didn't agree to any of this. I was just stupid enough to get into a car with Brandon."

Sal looked more shocked than Wiley did. Wiley just looked pissed off.

"Yeah, that sounds like something McCartnnon would arrange," Wiley said. "Why did he want you, anyway? You have any kind of gift?"

I shook my head. "I'm altogether a pretty unexceptional guy. I did already know about some of this, though, so maybe that's why?"

Wiley shrugged. "I guess unexceptional is exactly what Brandon is, and McCartnnon seems to like him just fine."

I watched the glow of Sal's light healing my leg. I was probably going to have to throw my shirt away, but there was no helping that. Hopefully I would be dropped off right outside my apartment building so nobody would see me in a shirt covered with blood and mysterious black stains.

"Isn't Brandon's appeal in his obedience, though?" I asked. "I really don't plan to be a very good little henchman.”

"What you plan and what he plans are two different things," Wiley told me. "He has a tendency to get his own way."

I frowned. I wanted to debate that, but hadn't he already been manipulating me all day? And now I'd even agreed to work for him. "Yeah, I guess."

But no. I couldn't mindlessly submit to him, not even to keep Zion safe, because I needed to do something about those kids. If they weren't evil as McCartnnon had said they were — and I strongly suspected they were not — then I couldn't simply leave them to their fate.

Sal was just finishing up with wiping the blood off of my now fully healed leg when McCartnnon returned. Again he didn't bother with the door buzzer. The smile on his face that seemed ever present whenever he was talking to me broadened when he spotted Wiley.

"Ah, Wiley, exactly who I wanted to speak to," McCartnnon said. "You will be providing Jude's training to ensure nothing unfortunate happens. Sal, you will also be expected to be on hand during any dangerous training activities. It wouldn't do to have him bleeding all over the base. You've done enough of that today, haven't you, Jude?"

Well, that I couldn't argue with, but... "What is this training going to involve that it'd leave me bleeding?"

"Oh, I'm sure Wiley will come up with something suitable," McCartnnon said like it was no big deal. "A dangerous job requires dangerous training, after all, but it's preferable that it not become deadly."

"And suddenly you care about me not getting killed."

"Oh I do, Jude," McCartnnon said, and he sounded really disconcertingly sincere. Who knew that someone with so much control over my safety saying he cared about my wellbeing could ever seem like a negative thing, but somehow McCartnnon managed it. He pulled a few folded up pieces of paper out of his jacket and handed them to me. "Your contract. Please sign it."

It was difficult to focus on reading the contract while everyone was waiting and watching, but I got the gist of it. As McCartnnon had promised I would be trained to hunt only non-humanoid demons. I would work from nine until five, Monday to Friday, unless I was needed at another time for some reason. It paid nearly twice as much as my old job. I signed it. I didn't have much choice.

McCartnnon's grin was shark-like. "Excellent! Wiley, you will get Jude some clean clothes and then show him around the base. Try to get him to eat and drink something; he was very stubborn with me. When you're done, you will drive him home."

"All right," Wiley said. His demeanour was disturbingly muted compared to how he'd been before McCartnnon had returned.

"Excellent!" McCartnnon said again. "Have fun, Jude."

With that, he left. Silence hung in the air between the three of us for a moment after the door slid shut, and was then promptly broken by Wiley growling and punching the wall. As it was made of stone, the wall remained unharmed but his knuckles immediately started bleeding.

Sal reached for his hand with an exasperated sigh. "Yes, that was very helpful."

"Avoid him," Wiley told me firmly as Sal began working on healing his knuckles. "He seems to like you a lot more than makes any non-creepy sense."

"I don't know that anything about McCartnnon makes any kind of non-creepy sense," I said. "But yes, I was already planning to avoid him."

Sal had finished healing Wiley, so he went to wash his hand off in the sink. "Good. Whatever he wants from you, there's nothing anybody can do to stop him."

And that was really fucking depressing on multiple levels. How could I do anything about the kids if I couldn't even protect myself? There was no way to get them out past all the security, and it seemed like nobody was willing to cross McCartnnon. The kids were a secret, though, and that had to be for a reason. If he were really all powerful, unstoppable, he would have no reason to bother. What I really needed was someone to help me, but there was so much riding on this. My safety and the fate of the kids. I would keep quiet until I knew for sure that whoever I told wouldn't betray me.

Wiley had brightened up enough to give Sal a cheerful goodbye by the time we left, though I noticed his expression flattened out again as soon as the door hissed shut behind us. He didn't tell me where we were going, so I could only assume it was to get clean clothes as McCartnnon had instructed.

When we got in the elevator, Wiley pressed the button for floor six. We spent the few seconds it took for the elevator to get to our destination in awkward silence. Awkward for me, anyway. Wiley mostly just looked indifferent.

Unlike the other floors I'd visited which had all had only a single corridor, floor six had corridors going out in three directions. Wiley led us down the central branch.

The doors along the corridor were evenly spaced and, besides the letters and numbers printed on the front of them, all looked exactly alike. The doors had started counting up from one and all the numbers had the letter B affixed to the ends. We reached door 17B before Wiley stopped and scanned his card.

"This is my apartment," Wiley said as the doors slid open and he stepped inside.

I followed Wiley inside and found that his apartment was far nicer than I had expected. Really, the only difference between it and a normal apartment was that it lacked windows. Thankfully someone had covered up the rock with normal walls painted a nice, inoffensive white and covered the floors with carpet. Well, in this room, the living room, anyway. From where I was standing I could see the tiled corner of the kitchen floor through a door leading off of the living room.

There was a sofa, two armchairs, a large wooden coffee table, a widescreen TV with a fully equipped entertainment system, and a shelf full of DVDs and video games. They even had a rug. What purpose did rugs even serve when you already had carpet? Suffice to say, it was a hell of a lot nicer than my dingy little apartment.

"Does anyone else live here?" I asked as Wiley led me down a short hallway. The apartment seemed to have too many rooms to house just one person.

"Not right now," Wiley said. "There's a lot of free living space at the moment, and I haven't found any good reason to share yet."

The door Wiley opened led to a room which was about as small as it could be while still housing a full-sized bed, a dresser, and a bookshelf without being cramped. I followed Wiley inside.

Wiley headed for the dresser, but I was drawn to the bookshelf. I enjoyed reading, but it was more the curiosity about what a guy like Wiley read than an innate love of books that drew me in.

At a glance I saw The Encyclopaedia of Demons Volume One: Humanoid Demons. Volume two, about non-humanoid demons, was next to it. Another particularly thick book was titled The Psychology of Humanoid Demons and there were ones about demonic biology for both humanoid and non-humanoid demons.

"Focus, Jude," Wiley said, and rapped his knuckles on the dresser.

"Can I read these some time?"

"Come here and pick out some clothes," he said. "Those are a bit too advanced for you. I'll find you some first year textbooks."

I abandoned the bookshelf and went over to the dresser, but I was too distracted to focus on the clothes. "First year? First year of what?"

"Maybe if you pick out some clothes, I'll tell you."

I huffed in annoyance but turned my attention to the dresser. Wiley and I were about the same size, so that wouldn't be an issue. I tried to find something like what I generally wore, cheap jeans or cargo pants and a T-shirt. I quickly realised that 'cheap' didn't describe anything Wiley owned. I picked out expensive jeans and an expensive T-shirt instead.

"Happy?" I asked him. "Now tell me."

"Deliriously," Wiley said. "There are courses, usually four or six years in duration. You learn how to fight and you learn the theory. We don't have the classes here, though, and I get the feeling McCartnnon wants you to be ready to work sooner rather than later. You should probably read the textbooks anyway, though, so I'll get them for you."

I'd never been able to think of anything I enjoyed enough to dedicate my life to, so I hadn't ended up going to university. If I'd been given the option of studying demons... Yeah, I might have. Not that I was sure I wanted to dedicate my life to this, mostly because it was likely to dramatically shorten said life, but it was at least sure to hold my attention.

"I'd like that. Thanks."

"Now come on, I'll show you where the bathroom is so you can take a shower. McCartnnon didn't tell me to let you shower so this is out of the kindness of my own heart. Plus you smell kind of gross."

"You're so generous," I told him as I followed him out of the room.

He directed me towards the bathroom further down the hall. "You can use whatever's in there. You've got some blood in your hair, so you might want to wash it."

With that, he left me to it.

Wiley's bathroom was clean and uncluttered, and when I turned on the shower I discovered the water pressure was fantastic. The temperature didn't fluctuate like it did in my shower, and I suspected the hot water would last more than five minutes, too. I used Wiley's shampoo and found that it left my hair feeling soft rather than dried out like mine did. I supposed he'd need to have the good stuff with hair like his.

I didn't want to annoy Wiley by dawdling in the shower for too long, but even the less than ten minutes I did spend in there was enough to make me feel a little more relaxed. Getting the icky feeling off of my skin definitely helped, too. I dressed in Wiley's clothes and went back out to find him.

He was sitting on the living room couch, reading something on his tablet. He spoke without looking up. "Guess we'd better get this tour started." He sighed, set the tablet aside, and stood up.

"It's just a tour, you drama queen," I told him.

That got a smile out of him. "Don't sass me, kid. Come on, then."

The rest of the compound, it turned out, was huge. There were a few floors of housing, though Wiley informed me that most of it was uninhabited. I wondered why they had so much more housing space than they were using. Were they understaffed? Wiley didn't seem interested in talking on the subject.

There was a gym complete with Olympic sized swimming pool, offices for techs and clinics for doctors, and even a huge area dedicated to hydroponics. The last place Wiley brought me to was the training area. What I saw there made my gut clench anxiously.

It looked like a ring for cage matches. There was an area of concrete separated from the rest of the room by way of crossed bar metal fences. It had a matching roof and suspicious brown and black stains on the floor. It was about three times as long as me lengthwise and twice as long as me width wise. Leading into it was one regular door, and another entrance via a smaller attached caged area. I was starting to get ideas about what might be done here.

Wiley saw the panic in my eyes and shrugged in response. "You can only really learn by doing, right? You're lucky McCartnnon wants you alive so badly. With the combination of my ability and Sal's, there's virtually no chance of you getting killed in here."

"I'm guessing your ability isn't limited to having freaky eyes, then."

"You would think the blessing of freaky eyes would be more than enough power for one man, but no. I can constantly see about ten seconds into the future."

"Huh." What was I even supposed to say to something like that? He'd said it so casually, like it was some everyday aspect of himself. Would I ever reach a point in all of this where things like Wiley and Sal's powers would cease to amaze me? I kind of hoped not. It was the one thing about all this that was actually kind of cool.

Apparently Wiley hadn't expected me to comment, because he was already walking away. He took me to the cafeteria next.

The cafeteria was huge, clearly designed to serve the whole base, and though it wasn't long past lunch time it was far from full. After all the grey rock I'd been subjected to on the rest of the tour, it was nice to see white walls and the high white ceiling. The floors were even tiled.

I hadn't realised how hungry I was until I smelled food, and then yeah, I was starving. I hadn't eaten all day. Despite it being just after lunch there was still plenty of food, and it smelled good.

"Technically I don't have to feed you." Wiley handed me a tray and took one for himself. "That part was a request."

"And I'm sure if you told him you didn't disobey him, you simply declined to fulfil a request, he would be perfectly understanding."

"He would, actually." Wiley stepped up to the serving station and began looking over the food. "I guess he considers it his mistake if I can find loopholes."

"What if you actually defied him?" I asked. "Like, he ordered you to do something and you didn't do it. Or you did something he ordered you not to do."

Wiley frowned down at the fruit salad in front of him. "I wouldn't? That's not how it works."

"How do you tell an order from a request, anyway? I mean, isn't that a bit ambiguous?"

Wiley brightened again and took some of the fruit salad. "Nah, not the way he says it. He'll say 'you will do this'. It's not at all ambiguous."

I froze as memories came flooding back. When I'd first met McCartnnon and he'd said those words to us. You will tell me everything you know, and Mikey had. And to Alex, You will behave for our guest, and Alex had. If it weren't for the way Mikey had responded, I would have assumed these people were just scared of him. Slowly, though, I was starting to put the pieces together.

But whatever his trick was, it didn't seem to work on me. He'd addressed both me and Mikey when we'd first met, but only Mikey had folded. Now that I thought about it, hadn't McCartnnon seemed intrigued? Amused? If he did have some kind of power, was I immune to it? And if he did and I was then he surely knew about it, so why would he show me the secret floor? What did he really want from me?

"Jude," Wiley said, interrupting my thoughts. "Problem?"

I hesitated for a long moment before shaking my head. "No, I just... No. I'm fine."

He didn't look like he believed me, but he also didn't look like he cared. He returned his attention to the food.

Suddenly I wasn't hungry anymore. My stomach was clenched too tight for me to force food into it. I gathered food onto my tray anyway, not particularly caring what.

I wondered if I should tell Wiley. Wouldn't he know what to do? Surely he'd know better than I did, anyway. But what if he told McCartnnon? What if he didn't believe me at all? It should have been a blessing to be able to resist whatever powers of manipulation McCartnnon had, but instead all it put on me was what seemed like an impossible burden. We sat down at a table and I forced down my egg and salad sandwich.

Wiley finished eating before me, and he sat back and stared at me while I ate.

"What?" I asked after it started to get awkward.

"Going through dead end conversations," Wiley said. When I looked confused, he explained. "Seeing the future means not having to carry through with every conversation if it doesn't produce anything and it ends quickly enough. Like, say I ask how old you are. You say you're eighteen, that it's your birthday today. I express mild sympathy and less mild amusement. Conversation over."

"That's creepy. Don't do that. It's weird not knowing what I've told you."

He shrugged. "No more than ten seconds of anything. Nothing I cared about enough to ask more."

That was a no, he wouldn't stop doing it, then. "That's not fair. I don't have a power, which around here means I'm practically disabled. Why would you pick on a disabled person, you monster?"

He scoffed at me. "There are plenty of people around here without abilities. Hell, most people on base don't have them, including over half of those involved in combat. You're so not special that even in that, you are not special."

"You're terrible and I hate you."

"Oh good, I'm glad we've gotten that out of the way. I thought we'd have to wait until tomorrow before you reached that conclusion."

"What are you going to do tomorrow?" I asked, but he just smiled at me.