Part Three--Dispatches from the Twilight War

(Author's Note: Confused? Here is the link to Part One and this will take you to Part Two.)

Despite the bitter cold of the early Colorado morning, Jack Harper sat outside on the porch of the cabin he and Carol Briggs had taken refuge two days before after fleeing the roadside diner and the human-looking monsters that were pursuing them. Next him was a table where two legals pad lay containing all the information about Carol and her family that he had gathered after long drawn out hours of questioning the woman. Just a few inches after that was his pistol, fully loaded, with a round in the chamber and the safety off.

After arriving at the cabin Jack started interviewing Carol about her husband working on the theory that he was hiding something in his past that including human-looking creatures with incredible strength and stamina. But after hours of intense questioning Jack was dealing with the disturbing possibility that Michael Briggs was just the suburban living, copier technician, middle class guy she claimed. This prompted Jack to change tactics and start reviewing Carol's life for anomalies that might suggest she or someone in her family might have a hidden past.

There was one relatively minor inconsistency both Carol and her husband shared, neither had any close family members. Carol did have siblings but had not seen or talked to any of them since their parents had passed away in a car crash about ten years before. Supposedly there was some extreme bad blood concerning the disposition of her parents' estate resulting in Carol and her siblings all taking legal action against the others. As for her husband, Michael spent his childhood being raised by his maternal grandparents who had long since passed away. Neither instance was that out of the ordinary, Jack himself didn't have any close family. But in Carol and Michael's case, he couldn't help but feel it was all a little too convenient as far as past histories were concerned, hence the reason he was now keeping his pistol within easy reach. Carol Briggs continued to have that “deer caught in the headlights” look of someone barely dealing with the both the tragic and surreal aspects of recent events but Jack was now harboring a nagging suspicion about his middle class client.

Jack knew this particular case had long since passed the point were he should have punted it to a person in actual authority, something inside him couldn't quite yet allow him to take that course of action. While Jack had expended everything he could do while hiding in a cabin on the side of a heavily wooded mountain, he had contacts who could do more.

“Hey Jack,” Carol said after cracking open the front door, “you want some breakfast?”

Jack knew Carol was puttering around the small kitchen so he didn't react suddenly. “Yeah that would be great,” he said. Since coming to the cabin Carol had alternated between becoming totally distraught, fearful of what had become of her husband and son to being consumed in any activity she could find. Which usually meant cooking meals or cleaning the cabin.

The cabin itself was exactly as Jack expected, it was less a survivalist hideaway but more than a simple retreat for someone wanting to get away from the city. The actual owner lived in Denver and made his living as an investment banker who fancied himself as a bit of a master playboy. Jack knew the guy used the place mainly for seclusion for both professional and personal reasons. The former being the times he needed to review financial data and the later so he could entertain the latest in a series of married women he liked to seduce. The small sanctuary was isolated on the side of a heavily-wooded mountain and boasted a plentiful supply of canned goods, dried meats, and a private well. Despite the amenities favoring those inclined to leave civilization behind it was still attached to the local electrical grid which allowed the banker to access the internet.

Thirty-minutes later Jack is back inside and sitting on the couch gulping down a plate full of re-hydrated scrambled eggs watching the television. By this time the morning news is on and both Jack and Carol found it quite disturbing. Not for the news items they reported but for the things they barely or didn't mention at all. The restaurant Jack and Carol shot their way out of two days before had long since been forgotten. Given the number of people that were in the building it would have been impossible for the news services not to learn of it, but the official story reported on the news was that it was a gang-related shooting involving a bad drug deal.

The basic report was vague but hat details the news agencies did report strongly suggested that someone with influence was doing their best to cover everything up with a huge pile of disinformation. Even more disturbing was that Carol's disappearance, occurring after that of her husband and son had never been mentioned on the television news or newspapers. All this told Jack was that before he could turn Carol over to some authority he would have to find one that could be trusted.

“What are we going to do Jack?” Carol asked from the small kitchen where she was eating her breakfast.

“I've got some feelers out with people who can help us.” Jack said leaving out the part that these feelers was a computer hacker acquaintance that was delving far deeper into Carol and her husband's past than he could personally hope to accomplish. Jack watched Carol's carefully crafted brave face quickly begin to crumble to the point she excused herself and retreated to the cabin's small bedroom. Jack thought to himself that if she was willfully hiding something linking her to the creatures her despair was the best acting job he had ever seen.

With Carol in the bedroom Jack took a few moments to clean everything up and think. The thing that scared him most of all was the memory of the security cameras looking over the parking lot of the restaurant they had to flee. Any decent investigator could do much to find their quarry with that little bit of information. The fact that Jack and Carol were dealing with some sort of super-human only meant they would have to move that much sooner.

This raised the question as to what he would do if in fact Carol was somehow connected to the creatures that were certainly looking for him now just as much as his client. The creature going by the name Joaquin Weiss, he had shot twice in the stomach and once in the knee, didn't seem the type that would easily bury the hatchet. After Jack shot Joaquin and watched it fall to the floor of the restaurant it looked at him with a hate that was all consuming. It was only the severity of the bullet wounds that prevented Joaquin from standing up and killing Jack right there.

As Jack put the last dish away he heard a beeping noise coming from one of the pockets of leather jacket. He immediately knew it was his the special encrypted satellite cell phone he used for calls he wanted to make sure were heard only between him and the caller, in this case the computer hacker looking into Carol's family. He moved swiftly and quietly snatching up the jacket and going outside before answering the call.

“Yeah this is Jack Harper,” he said, “what have you got for me Roy?”

Roy Hernandez was a thirty-something computer geek who desperately wanted to go back in time and live like the hippies of the 1960's. The few times Jack had actually been face to face with Roy it was clear that while the man was certainly a computer genius he was also dealing with several severely loose screws in his head. Besides his long hair and unkempt beard the guy wore only raggedy tie-dye t-shirts and cut off blue jeans. Adding to the persona was the overwhelming smell of marijuana that hung over him like a cloud. These traits all added up to a guy who while possessing a master's degree from MIT was extremely paranoid of all authority figures. Roy's appearance, demeanor, and opinions about authority figures seemed so over the top that Jack actually considered the possibility that it was all an act meant to make him easy to disappear into the background static of the rest of humanity if the need to arose.

“Jack,” Roy said, “I'm not sure what you've gotten yourself into this time but this woman Carol Briggs is probably very bad news. I snooped around the usual sites like birth records, educational history, the IRS, and even the Colorado DMV and it all looked normal for both her and her husband. But then on a whim I backtracked and looked at the code surrounding those records. Jack up until eight years ago this Carol Briggs you're involved with nor her husband existed.”

“Wait a minute Roy,” Jack said wanting him to confirm what he thought Roy had just stated. “Tell me that again slowly so I fully understand.”

Roy signed heavily, “Jack old buddy, the records I found are fully authorized by the various agencies and they go back to the birth dates you gave me. But someone inserted them into the databases just over eight years ago, what I'm saying is prior to that Carol and Michael Briggs must have dropped out of the sky.”

“Are we talking witness relocation and new identities created by some federal agency?” Jack asked.

“Here's the real puzzle Jack, I can't honestly answer that. I've played around in all the federal databases that do that sort of thing so I know how the DEA, CIA, ATF, or even your FBI create new identities. Whoever did these used a completely different method, if fact I've got to skip town now because I believe they noticed me poking around.”

Roy stopped briefly to catch his breath. “Jack I'm not only skipping town, I'll being changing my own identity so don't try and contact me again. I'd advice you to disappear as well, this whole situation sticks like shit with a bad case of gangrene.” Immediately after that the line was cut leaving Jack's worst fears confirmed.