Intercepts: a horror novel Read online

  The man was probably in his forties. There was nothing particularly distinctive about him. Average height, average build, average looks. The photo was a candid shot, as though from the zoom-lens of a paparazzo… or spy.

  The man wore a finely-tailored white shirt in the photo. Combined with his perfect smile and full coifed head of hair, he certainly appeared to have wealth.

  That image lingered on the screen for a silent moment.

  And then the recorded voice of a woman sounded through the speakers. The voice was so loud and clear that Bishop winced in her seat. The voice simply said, “Victor Aminov.” The name sat there for a second, letting its last strains of sound-waves flutter into Bishop’s ear. When that single, quiet second passed, the voice again announced, “Victor Aminov.”

  Images collaged onto the screen in front of Bishop’s eyes. All pictures of the man Joe assumed was Victor Aminov.

  Baby photos.

  High school yearbook photos.

  Ukrainian military ID photos.

  Spy satellite photos.

  Photos of his houses. Photos of his cars. Photos of him with friends. Photos of him with his family.

  It all flashed onto the screen. Each visual was proceeded by a white burst of light. The image zoomed forward, briefly filling the screen, before taking its place in the background along with the growing wallpaper of other images. It all happened fast. Very fast. It became impossible for the eye to keep up and focus on any one single image. Pictures moved and flowed around the screen with an intense speed. The movements had no discernible, unifying pattern. Nothing that allowed the eye and the mind to relax. It was a complex, chaotic dance of imagery.

  Some pictures zoomed in slow. Others zipped on through.

  Some pictures roamed around the screen. Others stayed stationary.

  Some flashed and pulsated with light. Others stayed fixed in a clean, black frame.

  Every time they performed one of these sessions, Joe got a headache, even a little nauseous. Hannah once advised him not to look at the screen. But that was impossible. The arrangement of imagery was specifically designed to grab human eyeballs and twist them until a person could look at nothing but the barrage of visual noise.

  And then there was the actual noise.

  The woman’s recorded voice repeated that name. “Victor Aminov… Victor Aminov… Victor Aminov…” Sometimes the name was read at a high frequency. Sometimes at a low frequency. Sometimes it was sped up until it sounded like chipmunk gibberish. Sometimes it slowed to a crawl. The audio files of the name recitation overlapped with each other, forming a wall of sound.

  Joe glanced over at Mr. Aguirre. The man rubbed his eyes and swayed a bit on his feet. Even in the dim lighting of the Control Room, Joe clearly saw the blood draining from Mr. Aguirre’s face, turning his skin a yellow-greenish complexion. It was a look Joe was well-familiar with.

  “Help yourself to a seat,” Joe offered. “Look at the floor for a bit. It’ll re-center you.”

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” Mr. Aguirre said, waving off Joe. But Joe could see the man’s throat clenching, probably trying to swallow back bits of bile and vomit as though he were sea-sick.

  “What if we turned the volume in this room down?” Joe said.

  “No, no, no. I don’t require special treatment. Please, proceed.”

  Joe shrugged. “You’re the boss. Tariq, ease her on up to thirty percent.”

  Tariq worked his controls.

  On the main screen, Bishop seemed to know something was happening. She tried to twist her head, but the restraints held her in place. Her face, already beginning to bead and glisten with sweat, scrunched up as she tried to shut her eyelids. But the hooks held them open. Her neck and shoulders shimmied, having no real goal or purpose, but just squirming from the discomfort.

  And then she opened her mouth. A low moan crawled out of her throat. A steady, single quiet note of pain.

  “She’s making noise,” Chuck said. Bishop’s moan effectively blocked some of the sound from the speakers.

  Joe nodded. “Increase volume to compensate.”

  As Bishop’s moan grew in intensity, the volume of the repeated name — “Victor Aminov” — became louder. It soon drowned out Bishop’s soft wail.

  “Increase stimulation,” Joe said.

  A voice faded up over the speakers. The voice was that of a man, speaking what Joe could only assume was Ukrainian. The voice calmly discussed what was probably some business transaction. Additional conversations from that same voice overlapped with each other; they all seemed to be recorded from various intercepted phone calls.

  At the same time, more images flashed onto the screen. Maps. Documents. Victor Aminov’s signature. Victor Aminov’s doctor’s notes. Victor Aminov’s high school report card.

  All the noise, all the images, wound themselves up together.

  They went faster. And faster.

  Bishop’s arms pulled against her bindings. Her mouth dropped open. That soft, low moan suddenly transformed into a shrill scream of pain. Her jaw opened wider, pulling the skin on her cheeks taunt, seemingly trying to make her mouth larger so that more of that horrible scream could escape her body and maybe take some of the pain with it.

  “How much is she feeling, Tariq?” Joe asked, making sure to keep his voice calm and detached.

  “She’s at about twenty-five percent.”

  “Keep going.”

  Twenty-five percent.

  With all the stimulation occurring around her, only twenty-five percent was being processed by her nervous system. Someone with a higher paycheck than him had managed to attach percentages to the human sensory system, but Joe never quite understood what those percentages actually meant.

  Joe tried to imagine what that must feel like. What would it be like to have only twenty-five percent of your vision? When Bishop looked at that screen, was it just a foggy blast of flickering, moving light? Were the sound waves that entered her ears muffled, as though she were listening through water?

  And what about her skin? What did twenty-five percent of the texture and pressure of those straps binding her to the chair feel like?

  But the way they always screamed at this stage told Joe that although they were only processing a quarter of the stimulation, they were experiencing them on a level of intensity that he could never understand.

  He knew that when he crossed his legs for too long, his foot would “fall asleep.” It was a normal thing. The twisted nerves just couldn’t send signals to the brain. While the nerves stayed disconnected, they kept transmitting messages. When they finally reconnected, the flood of signals would burst forward and overwhelm the brain, causing the painful, tingling sensation of a sleeping foot. Unpleasant, yes. But it was obviously miniscule compared to the level of pain that the Antennas experienced.

  “She’s at thirty percent,” Tariq announced.

  Joe hated this part. He could accurately gauge each percentage increase in sensation because the Antenna’s screaming and writhing intensified as well. There seemed to be no upper limit to their wails. Every Antenna tore vocal cords during their first tunings.

  At this point, he noticed that Mr. Aguirre no longer had his eyes glued to the floor. He stood erect and leaning forward, holding his breath and completely enthralled by the twisting, yelling creature on the main screen.

  “EEGs spiking,” Hannah said. “Heart rate accelerated beyond acceptable levels. She’s not going to make it much higher.”

  “I say keep going,” Mr. Aguirre said, an intrigued little grin on his face, like a scientist entranced by the beauty of his work.

  “She’s in incredible pain,” Hannah said, turning around in her seat.

  “Ah, but what’s a little more?

  “Joe?” Hannah said, turning to him.

  Joe took a deep breath. “Continue,” he said.

  “Thirty-one percent,” Tariq said, his voice quivering with the announcement.

  Chuck had long ago turned his a
ttention away from the display. He focused on his work station, staring at his monitor and clicking his mouse in actions that Joe knew had no point.

  “Thirty-two… thirty-three… thirty-four…” Tariq had to raise his voice so that his announcements could be heard over the screams.

  Bishop strained every muscle against her bindings. Her screams grew hoarse and weak, but she put more force than ever behind them, creating unnatural rasping screeches.

  “Has one ever made it to fifty percent?” Mr. Aguirre asked with an air of detached curiosity. “My god, can you imagine the possibilities if we could get them to a hundred?”

  Before Joe could even answer, Bishop’s mouth twisted into a sneer. She released a sound that he had never heard before. It wasn’t the usual cry of pain, that animalistic attempt to shift the mind’s focus from the torturous nerve endings. No, instead, this scream was focused. Purposeful.

  This was a scream of fury.

  A scream of hatred.

  The scream lasted for only a moment, but it seemed to propel Bishop to a level of strength that Joe had never seen from an Antenna. She pushed forward against the straps that bound her to the chair. Every muscle in her body strained. These weren’t the sporadic muscle twitches that Joe usually observed. She strained all of her muscles together in tandem, like a rowing crew. All that combined force joined to make something uncompromisingly powerful.

  Joe watched, stunned, as the straps that bound Bishop’s head loosened and stretched, giving way to an extra half-inch of slack.

  But that was all Bishop needed.

  Instead of using the relieved tension as an opportunity to pull away from the contraption that propped open her eyelids, Bishop leaned into the eye hooks.

  “She’s scraping out her corneas!” Chuck shouted.

  On the screen, Bishop’s head jerked up and down as she leaned forward into the hooks and used them to gouge at her eyes. It took only moments. Blood splattered onto the equipment. It rolled down her cheeks.

  “Restrain her,” Joe said into his walkie-talkie.

  The orderlies hadn’t needed orders. They were already at Bishop’s side, grabbing her shoulders and head and pulling her away from the hooks.

  “Tariq, disable her,” Joe said.

  “Increasing gas flow,” Tariq said as he punched commands into his console. “She may have torn her breathing tube.”

  “Medical, check her tube.”

  “I’m on it,” Hannah said. Through her headset, she relayed orders to her crew.

  Joe kept his gaze on the screen.

  The medics and orderlies now gathered around Bishop. Some of them reattached her bindings while the others hurried to bandage her still-bleeding eyes. The flurry of activity blocked the camera angles. But amid the chaos, Joe could see the vivid crimson drops of blood roll down Bishop’s seat and splatter on the white floor.

  “Is she in?”

  Joe turned toward the voice. It came from Mr. Aguirre. He had stepped down off the platform and now stood with a hand resting on Chuck’s chair. Mr. Aguirre leaned forward, his head alongside Chuck’s, as he looked at the screens. Joe could see Chuck pulling away, uncomfortable with Aguirre’s proximity.

  “Is she in?” Aguirre repeated.

  “We’re aborting,” Joe said.

  “See if she’s in.” Mr. Aguirre stood and turned to face Joe. His tone didn’t seem to be ordering Joe to comply. If anything, he had the slightest edges of an excited grin teasing its way across his face — a curious child who wanted to know if the mouse traps he helped his dad set had actually ensnared something during the night.

  Although the frantic motion continued on the screen, all the work in the Control Room ceased. Everyone’s attention fixated on Joe. Hannah muted her walkie-talkie; Tariq’s hand hovered over his dial; Chuck backed away from his control panel.

  Joe tried not to look at their faces. He tried not to gauge their level of investment or their desire to continue. He simply stepped down off the platform and walked to Chuck’s control panel. He typed in a few commands. The monitor mounted in front of Bishop’s eyes — still flashing and collaging with images of Victor Aminov — went black. The cacophony of Victor Aminov’s voice recordings, as well as the female voice reciting his name, also cut off.

  The lights in Bishop’s cell then went black.

  The cameras switched to night vision mode. In the eerie green-and-white scene, all the guards and orderlies stopped moving. Even the medics bandaging Bishop’s bleeding eyes held their hands still, the gauze still loosely draped over her sockets that continued to pump out blood.

  No one dared move. No one dared speak. No one dared interrupt what was about to happen.

  Bishop, meanwhile, fought against her restraints.

  Joe picked up a microphone. He spoke into it. “Can you see?” he said.

  Bishop screamed. She twisted and writhed on the chair.

  “Can you see?” Joe repeated.

  Her screams began to lose their forcefulness. They transitioned into a cry.

  “Can you see?” he said again.

  Bishop’s head lolled from side to side. That face which was so anguished, so angry a moment ago, seemed to melt. Her lips turned downward into a deep grimace that pulled at her entire face. It was a look of profound pain.

  “Can you see?”

  “Please…” Bishop croaked out, her voice gravelly and torn. “Please… please… please…” It seemed to be the only word she could say.

  “Can you see?” Joe kept his delivery flat.

  During one of his earliest tuning sessions, he had made the mistake of trying to comfort an Antenna. He had tried to make his voice soothing and sympathetic, but it had only triggered more pleas for mercy, pleas that Joe could not grant. That entire session had to be scrapped, and then another Antenna had been forced to endure the process. Because of that, Joe pretended he was a robot, incapable of human response.

  “Can you see?”

  It wasn’t uncommon for them to have to wait thirty minutes for an answer to that question. Time meant nothing to the Antennas. They had become so unmoored to the physical plane that they seemed to struggle to grasp whether the question had actually been asked, as if the very concept of speech and questions were foreign to them now.

  Joe would simply repeat the question again.

  And again.

  And again.

  It was the kind of task that could be allocated to a recording, but Joe felt that as supervisor, it was his duty. Someone had to be the tether, reaching out into the darkness to make contact with this drifting sentience.

  “Can you see?”

  Bishop’s breathing finally slowed. Her body stopped straining. Instead of constantly pulling against her bindings, her muscles settled into a twitching motion of uncontrolled muscle spasms that spanned her entire body.

  Joe knew they were close now. “Can you see?”

  “Yes.” Bishop’s voice was strained and quivering, as if she struggled to hold herself together.

  Chuck tapped some commands on his keyboard. “Everything is recording. We’re ready to receive intercepts.”

  Joe leaned forward. “Where are you?”

  “In… in a car. No… no, a truck.”

  “What kind of truck?”

  “Big.”

  “Are you driving?”

  “No… no. I’m… passenger. Please, please, it hurts.”

  Joe kept his voice steady. “What do you see out the window of the truck?”

  “Buildings… roads… brown… fields.”

  “Are there animals in the field?”

  “Yes. Dogs… No. It’s… goats.”

  Mr. Aguirre raised an eyebrow. “Hmm. We suspected Victor might be making a trip into Turkey.”

  “There… there’s a sound,” Bishop said. “Ringing.”

  “A phone?” Joe said.

  “Yes... Please make it stop. It hurts.”

  “What is the number on the phone?” Joe asked.

&nbs
p; As Bishop began reciting back the number, Mr. Aguirre tapped Chuck on the shoulder. “Flag the phone number and send it on immediately. Might be important.”

  “I know, sir. I work here,” Chuck said as he expertly punched in his commands while looking over his shoulder to flash Mr. Aguirre a grin.

  Mr. Aguirre put his hands up and smiled in return. “Sorry. I meant no disrespect.” He looked toward Joe and bowed his head a bit. “I apologize. I’ll step back and let you guys do your job. I just get a little excited when I get to be on this end of the process.”

  “No hard feelings, sir,” Chuck said. “Can you tell us who Victor Aminov is and why he sucks?”

  “You know I can’t.”

  “I’m betting gun-runner,” Chuck said. “Russian name and all. Tariq?”

  “Drugs. President made that big speech on Tuesday about how the international drug trade funds terrorism. Mid-terms are in six months. I bet we’ll get a lot of drug runners between now and then.”

  “Well, look at you,” Chuck said. “Mr. News-Reader.”

  Joe loudly cleared his throat. “Gentlemen. Let’s focus,” he said curtly.

  “Sorry, Joe.” Chuck went back to work.

  Joe clicked on his microphone again. “Describe everything you see. Describe everything you hear. Describe everything you smell. If people speak a language you do not understand, repeat their words out loud. If you see writing in a language you cannot read, describe its shape. Omit no detail.”

  Bishop moaned.

  “Only when you’ve told us everything will you be done,” Joe said. “Only then can we make the pain stop.”

  Bishop, her body still twitching, tilted her head toward the camera. The bloody gauze still hung loosely from her eyes. Her mouth twisted open and Bishop began speaking. The words flowed out in long strings of sounds that slurred together. It formed a mumbling mass of incoherence.

  But no one in the Control Room seemed to mind.

  “Uplink to HQ confirmed,” Chuck said. “They’re receiving these intercepts in real-time. They’ll scrub and analyze them.”