Intercepts: a horror novel Read online

  INTERCEPTS

  a horror novel

  T.J. PAYNE

  Copyright © 2019

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Names, characters, and places are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Tunnel Falls

  Cover Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  EPILOGUE

  Also by T.J. Payne

  Free Excerpt

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I see nothing.

  Just blackness.

  But even blackness, when there’s nothing to contrast it against, is it truly black? Or is it just… nothing?

  I also feel nothing.

  I might be lying down.

  But I cannot feel the hardness of the floor against my back.

  I might be wearing clothes.

  But I cannot feel their fibers brushing against my skin.

  My mind tells my leg to kick.

  But I am unsure if my leg receives the message.

  My mind tells my arm to rise.

  Even as my mind strains, I do not know if my muscles have responded. Perhaps my arm is up, as I have commanded it to be. But I do not know.

  My mind tells my hand to touch my face.

  Maybe it has.

  Maybe it hasn’t.

  I tell my hand to hit my face, to slap it hard.

  Nothing.

  I tell my hand to stretch out its fingers and dig its nails into my cheek.

  To scratch. To claw. To rip away the flesh. To find the nerve-ends and pluck at them. To pull away the muscles and the tendons until they find the bone. The jaw bone. The cheek bone. Any bone. Find something.

  Fingers, I say, wrap yourselves around that bone.

  Now rip it out.

  Pull.

  Keep pulling.

  Deliver me a pain that I can feel.

  Let me know that I am alive.

  But I still feel nothing.

  Fingers, I say, feel my face. Find my eyes. Now, press down. Dig hard. Reach through the pupil. Reach to the back of the nerves. Dig until you stimulate some sort of sense.

  Maybe my hand is complying. Maybe it is digging through the flesh on my face like a mole digs through dirt. Maybe it is shoveling out chunks and throwing them aside.

  I do not know.

  I may never know.

  I scream. Not from pain, but because my ears can’t hear what I say. And so, I scream louder. I’m shouting. I’m telling myself to shriek. Any pitch, any frequency that might penetrate my dead ears.

  But I hear nothing.

  Maybe I never screamed at all. Maybe I never stopped screaming.

  I cannot even hear the quiet hum of a silent room. I cannot hear my heart beat in my ears, nor the air pass through my nose and into my lungs. I cannot feel that air either.

  Sometimes I worry that maybe I am not breathing. That I am suffocating. I panic. I think that I gasp for air at these times, but there is no way to know how my body has responded. There is no way for my body to report back to my mind that, yes, I am in fact still alive. Still breathing. Still pumping air through these lungs and blood through these veins.

  I do not know how long I have been here. Been like this. Unfeeling. I am no longer tethered to the concept of space and time. I remember that I am somebody. Or was somebody. But I do not remember who.

  It is easier to forget. It hurts less.

  I held onto memories for as long as I could because they were the only foundation that my mind had. Even if they were not tangible, they were something real. Something I could imagine myself standing on to make sense of who I am — or was — and my place in this world.

  But those memories slipped away long ago.

  I only remember that I once had memories.

  Now there is darkness.

  Only darkness.

  Well…

  Not only.

  It starts out faint, like a single buoy a mile off in a pitch black sea. Just a speck of light, bobbing up and down. It is small. So small. I’m not sure it’s really there. Perhaps it is only a spot on my eye, an echo of a pigment that my brain has held onto.

  And then I hear a sound. Muffled and far away.

  It is as if a train, made of sound, is racing toward me at incredible speed. It gets louder and louder, rattling the inside of my head as it approaches.

  I scream out, and for once I hear my screams.

  The sound jabs into my ears like ice picks.

  That little light suddenly grows big and bright, flashing a kaleidoscope of color and movement that fills my vision. It hurts and I try to shut my eyes, but I cannot. I am used to my body not responding to my mind’s commands, but this time it is different. I can feel my eyelids trying to close, trying to clamp shut to block out the searing bright light, but something presses against them, forcing them to remain open. The more I try, the more the stabs of pain ripple through my eyelids.

  I then realize that there are hooks prying my eyelids open.

  They must have placed the hooks there.

  They are making me watch.

  I can feel them holding me down. Their grip digs into my skin which tingles then throbs in pain. The spigot on my nerve endings has been turned on, and pain — burning, blinding pain — shoots through my skin, my veins, my muscles like gale winds whipping an already blazing inferno.

  My tongue tastes the inside of my mouth. It is filled with mint and bile. The taste overwhelms me so that it sends my stomach churning. I feel my innards retching and convulsing, and soon an acidic water bubbles into my mouth, sending its foul smell up into my nostrils, where it lodges itself and begins the nauseous cycle anew.

  They make this happen.

  They open my eyes to burn them with light.

  They open my ears to stab them with sound.

  They open my nerves to set them on fire.

  I do not know who they are.

  From the sides of my eyes, if I focus, I can see them. It is hard. It is so bright that my eyes cannot see. My mind retains the faintest fragments of the concept of Hell, and sometimes that’s where I think I am. Being tortured by an Evil so profound that my weakened mind cannot fully grasp its form.

  But as my vision clears ever-so-slightly, I can tell that these aren’t monsters or demons who toy with me so.

  These are men. These are women.

  Sometimes I hear them call each other by their names.

  They don’t know I am listening. They don’t know I understand them. They don’t even know tha
t I faintly recall the concept of names. Of identity.

  They call out one name in particular.

  “Joe.”

  “Joe Gerhard.”

  He controls this place.

  They answer to him.

  They bring me this pain on his orders.

  When my pain ends, and I return to the blackness, I search for Joe Gerhard.

  No matter how long I must search, no matter how far my mind must travel to get there, I will find Joe Gerhard.

  I will find those he loves.

  I will torture them.

  I will bring pain to them.

  Then I will bring pain to him.

  To Joe Gerhard. The master of my Hell.

  CHAPTER 1

  Carson was in a rush.

  He maneuvered his cart, which was too wide, through the stainless steel door, which was too narrow. There was barely a half-inch of clearance on either side of the cart, and, of course, he had to lift it over the small lip at the bottom of the door.

  Carson complained frequently that the “diaper pails,” as all the nurses called their work carts, needed to be redesigned for their purposes. Something smaller, lighter, more maneuverable in these tight workspaces. Not having to wrestle these damned things through every airlock would shave several minutes off each orderly’s rounds, and just that little bit of time — multiplied over several days, weeks, and months — meant that hundreds of man-hours would be saved. Just with new carts.

  But despite how loudly and how often he mentioned the design flaw, nothing ever changed.

  Someone once told him that it was easier to get a bill passed by Congress than it was to get an equipment authorization passed by the Company. Studies would need to be conducted, auditors sent in, and then the covert funding would need to be procured and funneled through various shell companies.

  It was a miracle that anything ever got done, Carson thought.

  When he started this job two years ago, Carson assumed that he worked at a place with unlimited resources — the months-long background check he endured probably cost tens of thousands of dollars by itself. But once he actually started working, he realized that everything was held together by duct tape and twine, not for lack of technological know-how, but because duct tape and twine were cheaper and easier than dealing with the crippling bureaucracy.

  He finally finagled his cart into the small chamber and let the stainless steel door shut behind him.

  Now, he waited.

  The lights in his little airlock chamber flashed red. Behind him, the door he just entered through hissed and whirled with the sound of an air-drill. A gasket in the door inflated to insure a full air-seal between this room and the main facility. It would take a minute.

  Carson sighed as he waited.

  He wore a watch, but he couldn’t see it. It was hidden beneath the sleeve of his blue “moon suit.”

  As he waited for the door to seal, and then for the airlock chamber to achieve sufficient high pressure, he went through the routine of grabbing the yellow, coiled hose that hung from the ceiling. He plugged it into his suit.

  With another hiss of air, his suit filled with oxygen and inflated with air pressure. He looked like a blue Marshmallow Man.

  The air, hissing into his suit and hood, drowned out most of the other noise and made him feel as though he were a deep-sea diver.

  He thought this whole charade was absurd. The Facility had borrowed their design, equipment, and procedures from the Bio-Safety Level 4 labs that were used to study bio-warfare pathogens like Ebola — viruses that were highly contagious and thus deserved levels of extreme caution while interacting with them.

  But there were no such pathogens at this facility.

  That wasn’t what they did here.

  The designers had simply cobbled together labs, checklists and procedures that didn’t quite match the mission. It was probably easier and cheaper. But Carson also wondered if the designers were even told what exactly they were designing. Or if they just winged it.

  Typical.

  The cut corners of the past were now mucking up Carson’s present. Each little obnoxious delay — none of which would exist if anyone higher-up actually listened to Carson — threatened to make him late for his date.

  Carson desperately wanted to impress the girl he was going to see tonight. Her profile pic was cute. Cuter than most who responded to his messages, at least. And the texts he exchanged with her showed a fun, sarcastic personality.

  Definitely out of his league.

  If Carson were going to win her over, though, he needed to clean himself up beforehand. That meant he needed to finish work early enough that he could scrub down and catch the 17:30 elevator to the surface. If he had to wait for the 18:00, he wouldn’t have time to get home and take a shower.

  The suit’s hood and mask made his head sweat and his hair turn greasy. Plus, he always left the Facility reeking of shit and bleach. Maybe the smells were simply embedded in his nostrils and she wouldn’t notice, but just to be safe, he wanted a little time to make himself presentable.

  The Company didn’t exactly forbid dating. Not even online dating. But the staff always murmured that the Company watched and vetted all such interactions. Carson had noticed that occasionally he’d meet a girl on an app only to have her mysteriously cut off all communication. He knew that “ghosting” was a thing in the real world, but Carson often wondered if the invisible hand of the Company had run a background on the girl, deemed her untrustworthy, and then swooped in and denied further access.

  Some fellow staffers had gone as far as to theorize that the Company remote-activated the microphones on their cell phones and eavesdropped on their dates. In this line of work, it wasn’t uncommon to be issued a vague citation/warning that one could only assume was because of something uttered in private.

  But Carson didn’t buy that story.

  The Company wasn’t all-powerful. If they were, then they would have purchased more maneuverable “diaper-pail” carts for their employees by now. If anything, Carson found them too inept. Powerful, yes. But also disorganized, clueless, and too secretive to be efficient.

  The light on the airlock finally changed to green.

  Carson disconnected the yellow oxygen hose from his suit, letting it coil itself back up toward the ceiling. He approached the second stainless steel door. As he was trained to do, he glanced through its square glass window to assess the room before entering.

  Everything in the next chamber seemed in order. No danger, no imminent threat.

  He swiped his key card at the pad beside the stainless steel door. With a loud click, the door unlocked.

  Carson cranked the handle and pulled open the airlock door, having to strain slightly as the air-pressure differential tried to shut it closed on him.

  With the door open, he grabbed hold of his cart and maneuvered it into the room.

  He stepped in and inspected his surroundings.

  Near the door ran a long viewing window that looked out at a corridor where other staffers went about their business, pushing their own diaper pails as they performed their rounds in other chambers. Occasionally, an armed guard wandered past on patrol. None of them paid attention to Carson; they all had their own duties.

  Carson hooked into a new oxygen hose as the door clicked and sealed behind him. The hissing of the oxygen filled his ears again. He stepped across the room, his boots leaving slight indentations in the white, padded floor. It was like walking on a soft gym mat. Early in his career, the combination of the bulky suit, the hose tether, and the soft floor made him trip and stumble, but he had grown accustomed to the nuisances of the job by now.

  He looked at the woman in the hospital gown who lay on the floor.

  “Afternoon, Bishop,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind I’m early. I got a big date tonight. The babe’s a total dime.”

  Bishop lay on her back, lolling her body from side to side. Her eyes were open and staring out of her bobbing shaved head. S
he didn’t seem to be focusing on anything in particular. Not that she could. She couldn’t see a thing.

  Her hands, strapped in protective mittens that looked like oven mitts, waved around, scratching and pawing at the air. Occasionally, her hand fell toward her face and pawed at her cheek and then her eyes, but after a moment, her hands moved on to other destinations.

  Her mouth stretched a few times, opening and closing in some motion that couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to form words or chew down hard on something.

  A soft moan escaped from her mouth. The moan rolled around her lips for a few seconds then quickly built in intensity before transforming into a piercing, agonized shriek. It was the type of sound that Carson imagined a mythical banshee might make. But as quickly as the scream rose, it receded back to a moan.

  The sounds used to really bother Carson. Sure, he laughed it off during his staff orientation. He even mimicked their moaning wails during lunch a few times. His department head lectured him and then wrote him up for that little act. Not that any future employer would ever see that citation. It vanished into the same void that every paper, email, or instruction manual slipped through in this place, never to be seen or referenced again.

  But the sounds — the choking, warbling screams these things made — wormed their way into Carson’s subconscious. For months after he started this job, whenever the wind rolled over the roof of his apartment, Carson swore it was building to a shriek. Every time he heard a semi-clogged bathroom drain make a glug-glug-glug, like Bishop did when her throat gagged on her own saliva, Carson expected a scream of intense agony to come out of the drain next.

  Over time, he managed to ignore the sounds they made, although he never fully managed to block them out. He convinced himself it was just the way they were. In fact, the moaning and screaming was probably good for keeping their lungs and vocal muscles active. They’d sure need them at some point.

  He figured Bishop could wail away. It wouldn’t slow him down one bit. He dug in his cart then turned and faced her. He held a pack of baby wipes in his left hand and what looked like an IV bag of apple sauce in his right.

  “Bath first? Or dinner?” he asked.