Triggered, p.1
Triggered, page 1
part #3 of Control Freakz Series
Triggered
Michael Evans
Want the Conspiracy Chronicles Starter Library, for free? Go to the end of this novel for more information on how you can claim your free copy of Deadwave (Conspiracy Chronicles Prequel) and the Deadwave Official Game Guide.
Dream On
Justin
Oh yeah!
I’m back. This time sharing a bit about Dream On (Control Freakz #2.5). I will let you know that this novella was by far my favorite to write and illuminates a shadowy organization that forms the foundation of an entire series of books that I have written called the Conspiracy Chronicles (set in the same world as Control Freakz). Here’s what you can expect in Dream On:
Set in between Delusional and Triggered is a new thrilling novella that uncovers the past of Justin.
Justin sacrificed his life to the Syndicate of Truth thirty years ago, and he’s afraid he will never get it back. He learned the secrets of the underground organization for the ultra-rich in part out of curiosity and in part to become one, but he had no idea what it truly was until it was too late.
Now, after betraying the Syndicate, his wife, and even inadvertently ending his own son’s life, he is hell-bent on changing everything. But leaving the Syndicate to fulfill his dream of being reunited with his lover Rose Parker, who is imprisoned in Area 51, is one that is seemingly impossible. The Syndicate kills anyone who attempts to leave it and Justin is no exception. However, Justin has a radical idea that would break Rose out of Area 51 and allow him to leave the Syndicate with his life. But it requires giving up everything.
This one’s my personal favorite. I hope it will be yours too. Only one way to find out! Let the good times begin...
Chapter 1
I am supposed to be dead.
And no, it’s not one of those stories of strength and courage of me overcoming a fight with cancer or some tragedy while backpacking in the woods. And no, it’s also not one of those stories of a life calmly and gracefully lived where I have surpassed my age in years on Earth that should have been allocated to me by father time and have walked in the service of others.
My life is quite the opposite.
I am in the business where people die, friends die, families die, memories die, and dreams are buried long before anyone enters it. I am in the business where law exists in written word, but nothing else, and the only real power that speaks is in the form of cash.
I was a member of the Syndicate of Truth. If you’re reading that and have no clue what it is, that’s probably a good thing; people who hear about us are either forced to join or killed immediately. We would rather have blood on our hands than the truth in the hands of others.
The fact is that we aren’t like the rest of them. We refuse to be. It’s not that we are that different, we want things to change just like everyone else, of course. After all, the only people that are truly happy with the world are those with their eyes closed, or those who find it easier to believe a lie.
We aren’t searching to create a happy world, or even a good one. The only goal is to get rich, or more accurately—to stay rich. The Syndicate of Truth is comprised of a number of political figures spanning from leaders in the Border Patrol all the way up to the Cabinet of President Ash. We aren’t necessarily working against President Ash; in a way we are just doing the work for him that he has ignored to meet the demands of. President Ash thought that after the Great Crash the wealthy would still find a way to continue increasing their assets and that the rest would eventually rebound to a level of stability.
Well, spoiler alert: he was wrong—very wrong. In fact, his fanatical vision of what he would turn America into was so far off from reality, that there were many moments when I, along with other members of the Syndicate, planned to remove him from power. But there was something about his lack of mental capacity, or more bluntly put—his stupidity—that made it easy to manipulate him. The entire time Protocol 00 ruled over the minds of everyone, President Ash thought he was the one in control. It was almost laughable to watch the despicable way in which he behaved once he believed he had an almost godlike control over the country. Except, that was just another illusion he made up in his own demented imagination, and the truth, well it would be something that I normally couldn’t tell you, but the antiquated rules of the Syndicate don’t matter anymore.
Nothing matters anymore. Not even the money they told me would cure everything.
“Justin,” his voice broke through my daze. I had a holograph of some newspaper articles projected in front of me, but I was so deep in thought that all the words blurred together into fuzzy, black lines. However, the instant I heard his voice down in the main area of the lodge at such a late area, my body instantly grew alert. “It’s happening now.”
“What do you mean, man?” I stood up, my knees, which had always been bad, cracking as I walked over to the window that Hayden stood by.
“I don’t really know. She never said she would do this, but look, this has to be it.”
I felt my heart rate start to pick up as my eyes connected with the dozens of blinking lights in the darkness. They must be taking off for their attack on Area 51. I stood there dumbfounded for a second, both me and Hayden exchanging nervous glances. Oh shit.
“I have to go.” I tried to keep my voice calm and upright, a skill that had became so natural at this point in my life, that I was convinced I could talk my way out of anything. In fact, I knew I could, because if I hadn’t been able to, I would already be dead. “I’ll figure this crap out in the morning, goodnight.”
“Goodnight. Although I won’t be sleeping.” Hayden chuckled nervously as he brushed back his smooth brown hair, a look of anxiety in his crisp blue eyes. The stress seemed to have not visibly caught up to him yet, except for in a few creases beneath his eyes. He was one of the younger guys in the Retributioners, maybe even the youngest, and I almost couldn't help but feel bad for him. He has to live to see this mess go on for decades more. Meanwhile, I—well most likely, I will just die.
“After so many years of this stuff constantly happening, it’s easy to grow desensitized to it.” I kept my voice low so that he could hear me but no one else, as I began to make my way to the red-carpet-covered staircase that led to the bedrooms upstairs.
“If what I think will happen ends up going down, the government will make sure there is nothing left of us to feel the hell they will put us through.”
I let his voice echo off the stained wooden planks that lined the walls and tried to forget about the insurmountable task of survival that lay ahead of me. Just get to Hunter and Natalie and take it from there. I glanced one last time at the golden chandelier that hung above the staircase, the flames of its candles seeming to whisper ever so softly with each plume of gas that emitted from it. If only my old life could be made into a wax candle and caramelized into oblivion. If only all my mistakes could be nothing but smoke. Instead, all I felt was the fire of my demons, and I didn’t know how to make it stop.
I bounded forward, down the hall, being careful to keep my footsteps as light as possible. Knowing Danielle, she already had motion detectors installed in the floorboards and security cameras built into the doorknobs, so being subtle had almost no purpose anymore. She will know what I’m about to do. She probably already knows what I have done, and she will kill me because of it.
I swallowed, for a rare moment in my life finally feeling a bit of doubt. I wasn’t afraid of Danielle; me and other members of the Syndicate could easily destroy her if we wanted to. I was terrified beyond belief that my grand plan to go back to living a normal life would fail, and that by risking everything I would end up gaining nothing.
Please, be awake. I knocked softly on the door of the room that Natalie had run off to earlier. My grand plan to escape the Syndicate and live the rest of my days in tranquility all depended on this one moment. If I couldn’t get Natalie and Ethan to sneak into Area 51 and break Rose out of her cell, then I could never get the love of my life back, and never have a good enough reason to escape the Syndicate and risk my life in the process.
Rose was not my first love, and I supposed maybe she would not be my last, but there was something about our connection that was more special than anything I had ever felt before. I was no stranger to extramarital affairs; even back in my days as governor in New York living in Albany, I had always been a free spirit. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my wife—I did, and I still do, it’s just that I never loved her enough to spend the rest of my life with her. There was something about us, maybe it was because we had been through too much together, or that she had witnessed my fall into the Syndicate without knowing all the secrets and lies I had to feed her each night, that made us grow apart. Or maybe it was the fact that I myself felt guilty over being with a kind, beautiful woman who deserved a man better than me. She didn't deserve a husband who allowed the Syndicate to kill their son as punishment for my colossal fuck-up with the blue pill. She didn’t deserve a man who would never love her the way I was supposed to.
“Natalie,” I whispered, hoping that my sharp voice would cut through their slumber and force them awake. “Ethan, c’mon.”
I gulped at the silence my whisper received in response. Dammit. I put my hand on the doorknob, its cold metal sending chills down my spine. Normally, I would have just barged right in and told them to get up and leave and try to go and get their memories back, and my love back. But I knew that the moment I opened the door, Danielle would get a notification sent directly to her ICL that their door opened, and there was no doubt
The window. I tried to picture the outside of the lodge in my mind from the few quick seconds that I had managed to look at it and remembered there being a ledge that dropped down from the roof and could get me close enough to their room to maybe throw a rock at it or make some commotion to get them awake. I sighed, and quickly picked up my pace to walk down to the end of the dimly lit hallway, where a staircase would inevitably lie, which hopefully led to the roof.
From all the mysterious government rooms I had been into, and numerous secret operations with gang members in Canada and Mexico, it had become almost instinct to find ways to escape the most obscure of places. Except, with the scars from the bombing of North Brother Island still fresh in my mind, and the lurking suspicion in the back of my mind that Danielle knew that I had talked to Natalie about getting her memories back and was waiting for the time to get me, that dampened my ability to quickly analyze my surroundings.
Shit, I have to contact Ollie. I made a series of gestures for my ICL with my hand, while opening the door to the staircase and speed-walking to the top. The air in the staircase had a distinctively musty aroma that took me back to the long summer days of working in the old farm I grew up near the Finger Lakes in New York. There was something about the heaviness of the air that was akin to that of the heavy smell of the old barn used to house the cows in the winter. It was a smell that took me back to the good old days, before the Syndicate, before my parents moved to Canada and never came back, and before I became responsible for killing tens of thousands of people.
But even back then life wasn’t that good either—I never knew what I thought I had until it was ripped away from me.
“Yo, Justin, what’s up?” Ollie’s voice vibrated in my head, perfectly rendered from the millions of data points in my memory from the countless number of times I had encountered him. The one thing the government couldn’t track was when we sent things using sheer thought. There were certain technologies we possessed that were too complex for President Ash and his intelligence to monitor—technologies he didn’t even know about—and it was best that way. After scientific progress was supposedly halted, the government gained control of all patents and scientific research in America. Yet, the government isn’t one entity, it is an institution with its own internal power structure, and President Ash is just the one with the illusion of power.
The Syndicate of Truth is the one that holds all the patents, and they are the ones that have the power to change everything.
“Big O, I got some news for you.” I motioned with my hand to send the thought. Luckily, my ICL was hooked up to the thought stream in my mind so I was able to see what thought it recorded and give it permission to send it or not. And when messages were encrypted using the Mindfeed application, President Ash wasn’t even able to detect its presence on his intelligence networks.
“Hit me with it.”
“Code Two.” I motioned upward with my hand again, as I opened the latch to the roof and let a chilling blast of air pound my face. Code 2 in the world of the Syndicate meant to rescue the person from their location as soon as possible. Luckily, Ollie was a general in the Air Force, so getting to anywhere in the world in short periods of time was his specialty.
“Code Two? Dude, we are right now about to initiate a war game.”
“I don’t care. This is serious.” I stumbled as I approached the edge of the sloped-timber roof but quickly regained my balance. “Danielle is onto me. Nothing to do with the Syndicate, don’t worry, but she thinks, since I was one of the last members to leave Ash’s regime and join her stupid rebel group, that I am an inside man of Ash.”
“Well, that’s good, let her keep thinking that.”
“Screw you, man. She wants to kill me. Not everything is about protecting the damn secrecy of the Syndicate.”
“Everything kinda is about that. For over a century we have existed, and we can’t come out of the shadows now—not yet, at least.” Even though he was just sending his thoughts wirelessly to my brain, my mind still deciphered the edge to his tone.
“Get here now. Just bring one of your sonic blasts that can simultaneously erase everyone’s memory of the fact that you even came. This is the last time I will ask you to save my ass, I promise.”
I paused, my heart beating fast for a second, as I waited breathlessly for his response. I stood on the middle of the roof, readying to jump down onto the ledge below where I could make my way by scaling the grooves in the wall over to Natalie and Hunter’s window.
“Code Two is a go.” His words echoed in my mind and I instantly felt a surge of adrenaline course through me. I just have to buy myself some time. I just have to create a distraction, and I can get out of here alive.
I lowered myself from the roof on top of the second story of the homey lodge that looked like it belonged on a ski resort, rather than on an island in the middle of Boston Harbor. I exhaled and let my body drop the few feet it had left to go to touch down onto the wood beneath me. The moment my feet connected with the steep slanted ceiling above the front porch of the lodge, I thought I was going to slip, but I managed to grab on to the grooves in the round pieces of timber that formed the walls of the lodge.
How come a big man like me always ends up doing the acrobatic shit? I thought back to all the times where I had to maneuver through small places, crawl through air condition vents quietly to listen in on conversations of government officials, and of course jump off many buildings and moving vehicles. I’m finally promising myself to never put myself in this kinda situation again. I sighed, taking a quick second to admire the warm rays of the moon that softly illuminated the bare tress and then glance at the fleet of helicopters whose beeping and obnoxiously loud propellers wrecked the calming atmosphere of the cold winter night.
We don’t have much time. At most they had about two minutes to get out there and board one of the dozens of crates full of killer robots being loaded into the aircraft. This is gonna be close. I walked to the edge of the porch ceiling and managed to get a grip on the grooves in between the wooden beams, and began to shimmy my way across the side of the building.
I probably appeared really awkward as I struggled to not slip and fall on my way over to their window—in fact, I could officially say that this was the creepiest thing I had ever done. I’m scaling across the side of a building in the middle of the night to wake up two people young enough to be my children. What has my life turned into? I exhaled, the weird way my body had to thrust against the wood of the building to keep my balance not only a horrific sight to any onlooker, but also a surprisingly daunting physical task.
Finally, after my back, which was much less limber than in my younger years, felt like it was about to give out, I approached their bedroom window, which was blatantly obvious as theirs due to the gaping hole in the glass. They got out. I turned around, half-shocked, half-relieved that their bodies were among the dozens madly dashing back and forth as the final preparations were made before the launch of the attack on Area 51.
I almost stumbled off the roof as I craned my neck to try and get sight of them. However, their whereabouts became clear in seconds after what appeared like a dead body strewn across the pavement was surrounded by a team of soldiers. They must have gotten inside one of the crates. They are gonna go in. This might actually work.
Wasting no time to see their reaction, or to try and test how long it would take for them to spot an athletic, yet bigger man clutching the bedroom window of the two most wanted people in America, I jumped down into the dead bush below. I ignored the stabbing pain of the thorny ends of the twigs digging into my skin and stood up, scanning the island for a suitable rendezvous point with Ollie, and his small fleet of Air Force vehicles he would inevitably bring with him.
This whole damn island is dead. I put my hand on the dead, dry grass that covered the ground in between the bare, lifeless oak trees that were scattered among the island. Anywhere that they choose to land could easily be spotted by anyone on the island. Anywhere I moved could easily be tracked by Danielle. I couldn’t try and stall time before Ollie arrived to save me from my death—I had to make time with my own hands.
