Sleeper Code by Thomas E. Sniegoski
“I don’t know how to drive,” Tom interrupted. “My parents wouldn’t teach me because of my condition, but somehow I did just fine.”
Madison folded her arms, her brow furrowing in concentration.
“What about those guys at my house?” Tom asked her. “Those were definitely real guns they were going to use to shoot you.”
The look on her face was almost comical, as if for a moment she had actually forgotten about them. “So, who were they?” she asked.
“They were transport, in charge of getting me to and from my missions. I wasn’t even supposed to know that I’d left my house, but whatever Quentin did, it woke me up while I was on a mission to kill some government guy.”
“And did you?” she asked suspiciously.
Tom shook his head. “No. The guy…”
Tremain. The name popped into his head. Christian Tremain.
“His name was Tremain, and he seemed to know what I was. He said he wanted to help me.”
“So why didn’t he?” she challenged.
“I panicked,” Tom said quietly. “I didn’t know what was happening, and I ran. Got picked up by Burt and Crenshaw and flown back to Butler.”
“Burt and Crenshaw?”
“The guys in the driveway.”
Madison nodded as if everything now made perfect sense. If only that were the case. “And why, again, were they after you?”
“When they picked me up, I was me, not Garrett.”
“Garrett?”
“The assassin. Tyler Garrett is his name.”
“Your other personality,” she added.
Tom nodded.
Madison turned to the side and kicked at some trash on the floor. She shook her head in disbelief and turned back to face him. “Everything you’ve told me is absolutely crazy,” she began slowly. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in my mind that you’re a nut job.”
Tom nodded. “Believe me, I know. If only there was some way…”
He paused, yet another piece of information rising slowly to the surface of his thoughts. It was almost as if Garrett was trying to help him.
“Tom?” Madison called. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a way I can prove what I’m saying is true.”
“Okay,” she said carefully. “How’s that?”
“There … there’s a transmitter in my body,” he said slowly. “It’s used to track my whereabouts, just in case I should go missing. They spent a lot of money on me and don’t want to lose their investment,” he explained. He got up and began to look through the trash on the floor, talking as he searched. “Remove the transmitter and you’ll have proof.” He reached down and picked up a bent nail and offered it to Madison. “Here, you can use this.”
Madison looked confused. “For what?”
Tom shrugged out of his coat and got down on his knees, pulling up his T-shirt to expose his back. “You’re going to have to break the skin to get at the tracking device,” he explained.
“You—you want me to cut you with this?” she stammered.
“It’s the only way,” Tom replied. “There should be a scar near my right shoulder blade. I remember getting it when I was eight years old. I fell on a piece of glass. I was using a chair to get a box of cookies off the top shelf above the sink and I lost my balance. I knocked a glass off the counter as I fell, and…” He paused.
“What?” Madison asked, behind him.
“I guess that never really happened,” he whispered sadly. He turned his head to look at her. “I wonder how much more of what I remember never really happened.”
And then he felt her hand on the bare skin of his back, the warmth of her tremulous breath tickling his neck, and suddenly he was no longer concerned with the past but only with the reality of the moment.
“Are … are you cold?” she asked in a tentative whisper. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine,” he stated, attempting to keep his emotions in check. He was surprised at his body’s reaction to her. Even after all he’d been through—was going through.
“What should I do?” she asked.
He tingled all over, sensing the closeness of her presence.
“Use the point of the nail to break the skin,” he directed.
“But… the nail is rusty and…”
“Don’t worry about it,” he assured her. “It’ll be fine. I’ll risk having to get a tetanus shot if it’s going to prove that I’m not out of my mind.”
He felt the cold point of the nail press down on his flesh and instinctively tensed the muscles in his back.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Madison stated, lifting the nail from his skin.
“You can do it, Madison. You have to do it, for both our sakes.”
He felt the tip of the nail again and winced at its sharp bite as she pressed it down into his skin. “If it helps, think of this as a really weird first date,” he said through gritted teeth.
She didn’t respond to his attempt at humor, continuing to dig into the layers of scar tissue.
“You’re bleeding,” she said finally.
“Grab that napkin over there,” he told her.
And she did so, snatching up the crumpled paper from the trash on the floor and dabbing at the wound. “I don’t see anything,” she said.
“Keep digging. They probably put it in deep so it wouldn’t be noticed.”
“Tom, there’s nothing here,” Madison said, and he could hear the exasperation creeping into her tone.
“It’s there,” he stated assertively, the burning pain in his shoulder blade radiating outward across his back.
“It’s not,” she cried, her voice beginning to quaver.
“You need to go deeper,” Tom said, regretting the words as they left his mouth.
“I can’t.” She was clearly on the verge of tears.
“Do what I tell you, damn it!” Tom screamed, a surge of anger bubbling up from some hidden reserve.
Madison shoved the nail into him, and he nearly screamed again when it broke through the next layer of tender tissue. Explosions of color bloomed before his eyes, and he felt himself becoming light-headed.
“Oh my God,” he heard Madison suddenly say.
“What is it?” he asked, craning his neck to see.
“I think I see something.” She continued to dig, dabbing at the wound with the blood-soaked napkin.
“Hurry.” He breathed in and out deeply, trying to block out the pain. “I’m not sure how much longer…”
Tom pitched forward to the ground, his face pressed to the filthy wooden floor.
“I’ve got it,” Madison said excitedly, probing deeper and deeper into the meat of his shoulder, using her fingers to explore the gash.
Tom couldn’t help himself. “No more,” he cried out, rolling away from her. His back was wet with blood and sweat.
Madison was on her knees, holding something about the size of one of his pills in her bloodstained fingertips. “I’ve got it,” she said almost dreamily. “It was there, just like you said…” Her voice trailed off as the weight of realization came crashing down on her.
Tom reached out and grabbed the transmitter, slick with blood. He placed it on the ground, then got to his feet and quickly stomped on it with the heel of his sneaker.
But he realized that his action was a little too late as he heard the sounds of multiple footfalls rumbling through the house.
“Tom?” Madison questioned, jumping to her feet to stand at his side.
He looked toward the window opening as a way for them to escape, but a man in black, his face hidden by a ski mask, had beaten them to it. Madison screamed as he leveled his assault weapon at them. Tom saw that it was a Special Operations Combat Assault Rifle, SCAR for short. Whoever had called in this assault wasn’t taking any chances. Two more masked soldiers moved into the room, their assault weapons at the ready as well.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” one of the men bellowed, and Madison ju
Faced with this latest threat, the presence inside was again stirred, surging to the front of his brain, clawing to be free. How easy it would be to lose control of it, Tom thought. Multiple scenarios of intense violence exploded in his mind, showing him what was likely to happen and how he should react.
The armed men moved cautiously closer, and Tom could tell they knew he—Garrett—could be a threat to them.
“Get down on the floor with your hands behind your head,” one of the gunmen yelled, staring intensely down the barrel of his weapon.
The lead soldier suddenly rushed forward, driving the butt of his rifle into Tom’s solar plexus, dropping him to his knees.
Madison screamed in protest as the other gunman roughly tore her away from him.
Hunched over, clutching at his aching stomach, Tom knew that they were out of options. If he and Madison were to survive, he had to give in to the strange and alien force that he could feel struggling deep inside him. He had to let it out.
No matter how much it scared him to do so.
Chapter 14
Madison’s mind was racing.
I’ve got to be on something, she thought feverishly. Someone’s slipped me something without me knowing and I’m, like, tripping or something.
It was the only explanation that made any kind of sense.
Her arm was being held by a masked soldier toting a machine gun. Tom was on his knees in front of the other soldier, coughing and gagging because he’d just been hit in the stomach with the butt of an assault rifle.
Yep, drugs. Has to be, or maybe it’s a fever dream.
Madison closed her eyes and counted to five, wishing with all her might that she’d wake up on the floor of somebody’s house, trying to recover from a wild night of partying. But deep down she knew it wouldn’t happen. Somehow this was real: the smell of the soldier’s nervous sweat, the stickiness of Tom’s drying blood on her hands, and the tortured sounds of his pain-racked coughs told her that it was all true.
All real.
The masked soldier who had aimed at them through the window outside had joined the party, entering the room with a confident swagger. “We got them,” he said. There was an excitement in his voice.
The soldier standing over Tom nodded, his gaze never leaving the helpless boy. “We sure did.”
But the words had no sooner left his mouth than Tom suddenly sprang up from his knees, moving so fast that Madison’s eyes could barely keep up.
“You don’t have shit,” she heard him growl as he took hold of the soldier’s machine gun, grabbing it by the barrel and angling the eruption of gunfire away from himself. And then the soldier was suddenly coughing and choking, clutching at his throat. He fell to the ground, but Tom was already on the move, hurling himself across the room toward another of their attackers.
If she had thought the situation was scary before, now she was utterly terrified.
Madison’s captor threw her roughly against the back wall, running to help his team. She fell to the ground, the wind knocked from her lungs, watching the fight unfolding in stunned silence.
It was hard to accept Tom’s crazy story about split personalities and assassins inside his head, even after finding the transmitter hidden beneath the skin of his shoulder. It was all so crazy.
But seeing him now, the way he stood, swaying on the balls of his feet, the slightest hint of a smile on his face, he did seem like a different person than the one she’d had ice cream with the previous night.
Madison had no choice but to believe.
All so crazy real.
It was a surreal feeling, suddenly knowing how to do things that he would never have imagined himself capable of. Tom was amazed and even a little excited as he prepared to deal with the soldiers sent to apprehend him. He could hear Tyler Garrett’s thoughts, cold and efficient and frighteningly matter-of-fact, as he explained how to take out the soldiers, one after another.
Take the leader first and watch the morale of the others crumble. Tom sprang into action. He grabbed hold of the muzzle of the machine gun held by the soldier who had hit him in the stomach and simply pushed it aside. Then he drove his outstretched fingers into the soldier’s throat, nearly collapsing his windpipe. He was moving on to his next opponent before the choking soldier even hit the floor.
The last soldier to enter had raised his weapon and was preparing to fire, but Tom was already spinning a leg around to swat the machine gun from the man’s hands with his foot. The soldier pulled a knife from a sheath strapped to his boot, driving Tom back—into the waiting arms of the gunman who had been guarding Madison.
Tom felt himself crushed in a powerful bear hug, but his mind remained surprisingly calm, calculating his follow-through as if he was doing a math problem. He shifted his body to one side, throwing the man behind him off balance. Then he tossed his head backward, driving the back of his skull into the man’s chin with enough force to stun him into loosening his grip.
The one with the knife came at him full tilt, but Tom wasn’t the least bit concerned. He had briefly turned around, relieving the man behind him of his sidearm. With cold-hearted efficiency he shot him once in the chest and with one fluid motion spun around to fire another round into the man with the knife.
The gunshots were like cracks of thunder within the confined space, their dull roar just beginning to fade as Madison started to scream.
“What are you doing?” she cried, staring at him with a disturbing mixture of disgust and horror. “You didn’t have to kill them.”
Tom lowered the gun, his feverish thought process beginning to slow now that the threat had been neutralized. “I know that, and I didn’t.”
He walked over to one of the felled men, pointing out a smoldering hole in the center of his chest. There was no blood.
“They’re all wearing body armor,” he explained. “The force of the bullet just knocked the wind out of their sails. They’ll be pretty bruised but fine.”
An overpowering urge to murder the soldiers came on him in a sudden flash. “But … but we can’t allow them to recover.”
Tom found himself taking aim at the nearest soldier on the floor. “If they do, they’ll be a danger to us all over again.”
It made perfect sense as his finger tightened on the trigger.
“Tom?”
The soft, fear-filled voice suddenly distracted him from the horror of what he was about to do. Tom looked toward Madison, using the same strength and determination he had developed over the years in struggling with his affliction to overpower his darker side, forcing it down—forcing it to the back of his consciousness and allowing himself to regain control.
Tom dropped to his knees before a frightened Madison.
“Tom,” she asked again cautiously. “Is … is it you or…”
He opened his eyes and looked down at the hand that still held the pistol.
“It’s me,” he said, letting the weapon tumble to the floor. “Thank God it’s me.”
Marty Arsenault opened one bleary eye and listened. The air conditioner continued to hum noisily as it had since he’d put it in the window during that ridiculously hot spell in the middle of May, the prevalent sound in their often-stuffy bedroom. Marty loved the AC, loved the chill it put in the air, allowing him to wrap himself in a blanket cocoon all year round, and especially loved the buffer it usually provided from the sounds of the outdoors.
Goddamned birds, he thought, not sure if it was indeed his winged enemies that had woken him, but he had heard something.
Rolling over, he looked at his wife and found her still fast asleep. He pulled the covers around himself and was about to dive back into the arms of unconsciousness when he heard the noise again.
Somebody was ringing the doorbell.
He thought about ignoring it, then worried that it might be something important. He sat up and again gazed at his sleeping wife, wondering if he should wake her. After all, misery di
Marty got up, slipped his feet into his slippers, and grabbed his robe. Opening the bedroom door, he padded stiffly out into the hallway. He glanced toward the guest room, where Madison was staying. It would take an atom bomb to wake her up, he thought, heading for the stairs.
The chimes of the doorbell were ringing again, and he quickened his step. This better be good, a cranky voice inside his head squawked.
“All right, all right,” he muttered under his breath as the bell rang yet another time.
Marty looked through the peephole but could see nothing. Then he remembered that Ellen had hung a summer wreath recently. Making sure that his bathrobe was tied tight, Marty unlocked the door and pulled it open.
At first he didn’t recognize the man and woman standing on his doorstep. Assuming they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, he was about to abruptly close the door when the man stepped forward.
“It’s Marty, right?” he said, sticking out his hand.
A spark of recognition burned through the still-lingering fog of sleep, and Marty nodded at his neighbors. He’d seen them so rarely in person that he barely knew their faces. He opened the door wide and smiled apologetically.
“Victoria and Mason,” the man continued with a good-natured laugh, pointing to his wife.
Marty nodded. “Yeah, from next door. Sorry, I’m still half asleep. What’s up?”
Mason stepped closer, pulling a gun from the small of his back and pointing it at Marty’s stomach.
“Wha—wha—?” Marty stammered, unable to take his eyes from the weapon.
“What’s this all about?” Mason suggested casually. “Why don’t you invite us in and we’ll discuss it.”
“Are they secure?” Tom asked Madison as he cinched the plastic restraints, which had likely been intended for them, around the wrists of one of the soldiers. He checked to be certain that the bonds were tight but not too tight and looked over to see how she was doing.