Hybrid

HYBRID

By: Ryan Locke

CHAPTER 1:

“What makes you special?”, he asks.

I pry my eyes open. My first thought is, “It’s freezing!”, I say out loud.

He replies, “That’s to keep you alert, attentive. It’s how we wake you up. You seem to be having a problem with your memory. We’ve gained some, but minimal ground on your long-term. Your short-term memory is completely non-existent. Do you remember speaking to me?”

I begin to analyze my circumstances. The room is bright white. Padded walls. Padded walls? I’m in a hospital bed propped up in front of a darkened glass window, probably bullet proof, with a human shadow on the other side. I’m in a jumpsuit. I can’t help but wonder why they put so much energy into padding the walls when this bed is so uncomfortable. I try to sit up, but realize I’m restrained to the bed.

“It’s cold as hell in here.”, I say.

“I don’t think hell is cold, John.”, his voice echoes through the speakers on the wall.

“Is that my name? John?”, It’s an honest question.

“As in John Doe, until you can tell us otherwise. We talked about that yesterday.”, he replies. “Do you remember talking to me yesterday?”

I have human instinct. I know I hate this guy, this question and this situation. I have to get out of here. I know I’m going to have to say all the right things, but for the life of me, I don’t have a single memory of any kind.

“No.”, is all I’ve got.

His shadow never flinches, not even a hand movement. “Why are you so calm if you honestly don’t know what’s going on?”, he asks.

I respond, “Instinct, I guess.”.

“Listen, John, believe me when I tell you that I am the best and the only friend you have in this world.”. He finally sits down on the other side of the black glass. I still can’t see his face. “I’ll make you a deal.”, he says, “I’ll tell you what I know about you once you tell me what you know about you.”.

I guess we’re playing chess. I say, “What’s with the bright lights, padded walls and restraints, friend? Why are you hiding in the shadows?”.

He replies, “You’re a very dangerous man, and we need to know a lot more about you before you can know who I am. That is specifically why this process is so important. I will inform you of a few facts to help get the ball rolling. You sustained some very serious injuries. You should be dead. In fact, you were dead. Then, you weren’t. You went into a comma for six days. You came out of your comma three days ago. This is our third time having this conversation.”

I’m at a complete loss. “What do you want from me?”, I ask.

“Start with the girl.”, he says.

Suddenly, like a movie, possibly even a movie about someone else’s life, my mind is overwhelmed with memories. It takes me away from the idea that I still want to know what he’s talking about. I’m flooded with emotions, the idea that maybe I know true love.

CHAPTER 2:

I wish I knew how to describe a sound. I’m in the shower. That repetitive thud of a thousand water bullets tap-dancing on my skull sooths me. “ThrdddThhhhhddddrrerr…”, is my best guess.

That’s my life’s very first memory, standing in the shower as a grown man.

I turn the water off and get out of the shower. It’s a very nice, clean, manly bathroom. There is a stack of towels on a stand. I grab one. It’s high quality.

I enter the bedroom. It’s the same as the bathroom, very clean, very modern and very manly. I try to remember what I’m getting ready for. I guess it doesn’t matter.

I exit my room and instinctively walk across the nicely furnished living room over to a door. Like I know what I’m doing, I pull a key out of my pocket, open the door and find a second bedroom. This room has no furniture, just suitcases lining the length of one wall. In front of me lies an open suitcase on the floor with stacks of hundred-dollar bills in it.

I exit my building. It’s a corner building across the street from a park. There are people everywhere you look. I check the street sign. I’m on 4th and A. I check my watch and it’s around eleven am.

I see a magazine kiosk at the mouth of the park. I head over to it and grab a newspaper. It’s a New York Times. Good to know.

A voice spills out of the darkness of the kiosk, “Buck eighty-five, bro.”.

I dig into my pocket. All I have are hundred-dollar bills.

“I aint breaking that, pal.”, the voice says.

I slap a hundred on the counter, head for a bench, sit and read the paper. When I’m done, I fold the paper up nicely, like brand new, bring it back to the kiosk, hand it to the voice inside and say, “You can re-sell this.”.

He grabs it from me, “Sure, thanks boss.”.

This is what I’ve learned so far; I have a nice apartment, I have a lot of money, I live in Manhattan, New York, it’s April 14th, 1997, the Knicks lost, the market is “bull”, and Victoria’s Secret is having a sale.

I understand everything. I know where New York is, who the Knicks are, what the market is, and what Victoria’s Secret is. The only thing I don’t know is who I am. So, I figure I can do one of two things. I can either freak out and desperately try to figure out my past and who I truly am, or I can take the tools I have at my disposal and just decide who I am.

I chose the latter.

I love walking in Manhattan. I love all the sounds, smells from the food stands, and all the different people scurrying around to accomplish all their different little missions. It’s fascinating.

The city is laid out perfectly, like a graph. All the avenues run north and south in alphabetical then numerical order, while all the streets run east and west in chronological order. You can’t get lost.

I head west until I hit Broadway. I turn right and head north until I hit 14th street, Union Square. I see a place called The Coffee Shop. I’m drawn to it. I don’t know why, but that’s where I’m going.

I enter. This place is not your typical, basic “coffee shop”. It’s just a clever name for a restaurant/bar that you can also get coffee at. The place is packed. Dozens of people are waiting to be seated, but luckily there is one space left at the bar. I walk up to the empty stool and hike my leg over the top like I’m mounting a motorcycle.

The bartender is helping another customer down the way. She sneaks a glance at me, “Holy shit.”.

Her eyes are dark green with a yellow corona that bleeds into the green creating a color I’ve never seen. Her eyes are literally prisms that capture, then share light with the world in ways that make you feel like God is just showing off. She has thick, jet -black hair to her shoulders, flawless, caramel skin, perfect bone structure and full, luscious red lips.

This is the only face I’ve ever seen.

She’s about 5’9”. Her body is perfectly taught and curvy. She dresses just sexy enough to let you know what you’re missing out on, but not slutty. She saunters over with a smile. She’s playful, “What can I get ya, city slicker?”, she says as she leans over the bar.

I say, “I need to hydrate, caffeinate and intoxicate.”

She pours me a glass of water. We never break eye contact as she places the glass in front of me. What a tease.

She grabs an oversized mug and does a 50/50 pour of coffee and whiskey almost to the top. Then, she pulls up a bottle of Bailey’s, “Light and Sweet?”.

“Dark and bitter”, I reply with a wink.

“Oh, maybe you’re actually a cowboy”, she says with a wink and adds more whiskey to the top of the mug and slides it to me. “We’ll save the light and sweet for another time.”.

I’m hooked.

Every once in a while, she has to go help other customers, but she makes it quick, and always comes right back to me. Her name is Fernanda. Her mom is Brazilian and her father is white. She’s twenty-one. She’s from Brooklyn and has lived here her whole life.

She asks me what my name is. I spot a bottle of Jim Beam and a bottle of Jack Daniels on the bar, so now my name is “Jim Daniels”.

“I guess you really are a cowboy… Jim Daniels.”, she says through a smirk. Her tease is unbelievable.

I stick around for three more pours, two of which she pours without my asking. Truth is, both of us know I’m sticking around until she gets off work so I can walk her home, which is exactly what happens. That was a year and a half ago. We’ve been together ever since.

CHAPTER 3

The speakers on the wall pull me out of my story, “Your memory seems to be doing much better today.”.

“Anything having to do with her.”, I say.

“What’s the very last thing you remember before waking up strapped to that bed?”, he asks.

I take a second to recall, “Ah, we woke around noon. We had had a late night…”.

He interrupts, “Where?”.

I reply, “At her place, like always.”.

“She would never stay at your place?”, he asks.

I shake my head, “No, she’s never even been there.”.

He’s getting frustrated, “You don’t find that weird John, Jim, Mr. Daniels, whatever your name is? You’re madly in love with this girl, you’ve been together for a year and half and she’s never been to your place?”.

I shrug, “No. We’re together almost every day, but it’s always at her place, out on the town, or…”.

He interrupts again, “Almost every day?”.

“I mean she’s got work, and her family and her friends…”, I say.

“You don’t do those things with her?”, he asks.

“I go to her work all time,”, I reply, “but I give her space when it comes to her family and friends. I guess I’m just not interested in meeting anybody else.”

Confused, he says, “What do you mean, anybody else? In the world? You don’t know anybody else? Nobody? None of her friends? No friends of your own?”

I answer, “That’s correct.”.

He presses me, “What do you do when you’re not with her?”.

I shrug, “I don’t know, go on walks, people watch at the park, stay home, read a book, get hammered, teach myself guitar, write poetry…”.

“Poetry?”, he asks, “do you have any of this poetry?”.

I answer him calmly, “Of course I do.”.

“Anything from before April 14th, 1997?”, he asks.

“Nope.”, I reply.

He sighs, “Tell me about the money.”.

I simply reply, “What about it?”.

He’s losing his patience, “I don’t know. You look to be about twenty-five, but you only remember a year and a half of your life, you only know one person in the entire world, and you’ve got what sounds to be like millions of dollars in cash sitting in your beautiful apartment, and you don’t know how it got there. Hell, you don’t know how you got there.”.

“Yeah,”, I say, “bout sums it up.”.

Another sigh, “How do you pay your rent if you don’t know anybody?”.

Simply put, “I don’t. I always figured that if anybody ever came around looking for rent money, or to try and kick me out, I’d just give them enough money to never come around again. Ever. And maybe, just maybe, I already did that before April 14th, 1997 and I just don’t remember.”.

He asks, “What did she think you do for a living? Where did she think the money came from?”.

I tell him, “I told her that I inherited the money. Which is essentially what happened.”.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he grumbles, “but everything you’re saying makes sense. You are a true John Doe. The only thing we know about you is what you tell us. Even then, we don’t know that what you say is true. I don’t know if you actually have an apartment, or money. You have no driver’s license, no identification of any kind, no tattoos, no credit cards, nothing. Nobody knows who you are. None of Fernanda’s family members or friends have ever even heard about you. We ran your fingerprints through the database, nothing. Dental records, nothing. We looked into any kind of lineage through blood work testing, nothing. We know everybody. But, not you. You don’t exist.”.

I nod in agreement, “That’s what I’ve been telling you. Now that we know everything there is to know about me, who are you?”.

“We’ll get there.” He clears his throat, “You were about to tell me the last thing you remember. You guys woke up… It was around noon..?”

This was a few hours ago in my mind, “We wake up. We have sex. Phenomenal sex. She reads the news to me while I cook breakfast. We eat. Then, she needs to get ready for work and I want to catch a matinee. Fargo. Ever seen it?”

He ignores the question. “What did you do after the movie?”, he asks.

I struggle to find more memories. “I don’t know.”, I admit.

He grumbles heavily, “Come on! We’re almost there. Think.”

I finally snap a little, “Listen man, you want me to be totally free and open with you and have things just rattle off my tongue, then get me out of these restraints. Get me out of these lights. Get me a sweater and a bourbon, dick.”.

Calmly, he says, “We’re almost there.”.

I sigh heavily. I’m digging apart every corner of my brain… “Wait…,”, I say, “Okay, I wanted to know what time it was, so I look at my wrist, and I don’t have my watch.”.

“Did you think it was at Fernanda’s?”, he asks.

“Yeah,”, I answer, “had to be.”.

He pushes me along, “So you went back to get it?”.

I reply, “Most likely. I must have.”.

Sharply, he says, “Not most likely. Either you did or you didn’t. Did you go back to Fernanda’s place to retrieve your watch?”.

I think about it, and the memories come in like snips and snaps, pictures, sounds, noises, silence… “I run across the street and enter her building. I get on the elevator. It’s full. I get off on the 22nd floor. I walk down the hall to her apartment. I get the key out of my pocket and open the door…”. I trail off.

He wants to know, “What do you see when you open the door?”.

I’m overwhelmed with emotion. The memories are suddenly very vivid. “I see him standing by the shattered window. Looking down at the street below. The wind sucks the flimsy curtains through the shards of glass to the outside world. I instantly knew what he had done.”.

“He, who?”, he asks.

I say, “I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I charge him. He hears me coming, turns with a gun and gets two shots off before I tackle him straight through the same hole in the window that he threw her out of. I see her body down below. I can’t look at her, so I look at him. I still have my hands around his throat as we fall to Earth. I see the fear in his eyes and it gives me the slightest sense of vindication…”.

“Then?”, he asks.

“Then I wake up in this bed.”, I reply.

Finally, he flicks on a light from his side of the window. I can see him clear as day. He’s in his 50’s. He wears a suit and tie. He looks everything like I imagined, a skinny little prick, with an angular face and far more scowl lines on his brow than necessary.

He looks me dead in the eye and says, “My name is Special Agent Edwards. The things I’m about to tell you are… unexplainable.

“There is so much going on in the world that nobody knows about. I’m the director of a, let’s call it a sub-division of the CIA, that the CIA doesn’t even know about. Like you, we don’t actually exist. I like to unofficially call us the SKS, Seek and Kill Squad. That’s what we do. We find the bad guys, the worst of the worst, and we eliminate the problem before it’s a problem. I’m talking about people that nobody has ever heard of. They’ve never been on CNN, FOX or MSNBC, at least not if we do our jobs right. We’re talking about the bosses, the money, the organizers, the engine you never see. They are placing bets bilaterally across all nations; the U.S., China, Russia, Korea, Europe, Africa, the Middle East…, They cause war to make money, and the people who actually implement and put their faces on the war don’t even know who they are bowing down to. We, SKS, find out who they are, we hunt them down, and we eliminate them. Nobody ever even knows it happened.”.

I couldn’t care less. I say, “That’s great. I’m very proud of you. Listen, I’m wondering if I’m dreaming right now. If my memories are a dream. I’m wondering about Fernanda.”.

His story begins, “On October 24th, 1998, at 3:58 pm 911 received eighteen calls about a woman crashing through her 22nd story apartment window and falling to her death. Approximately thirty-two seconds later 911 received forty-two calls about gunshots coming from the same apartment, then two men flying out of the same window and falling to their deaths. NYPD and EMTs arrive on site, and you three are all pronounced DUA, dead upon arrival. You are all three bagged and taken by a corner to the morgue.

“The police begin their investigation. The other man was Fernanda’s husband, Rafael. They’re separated, have been for years. They married when she was eighteen and she left him when she was nineteen. She’d been trying to get a divorce, but after all this time he wouldn’t do it. He was stalking her. She got a restraining order on him. Obviously, that didn’t work. Apparently, it seems, he discovered that the two of you had something serious going on, so he gets jealous and kills her. Then, you show up and kill him and yourself. All within a matter of a minute.

“This is where it gets interesting. Six witnesses told police, separately, on their own, that they saw your body give off an energy, like a shield, absorbent type… I don’t know, they said a sudden flash of blue light, and maybe a sonic boom, shock wave, protection barrier type thing that you were able to implement right before impact, softening your catastrophic clash with the ground. Clearly you died, but you didn’t pop like a pumpkin like the others.

“Fifty-four hours and forty-two minutes after you were pronounced dead, bagged and brought to the morgue, I intercept a call. It’s the morgue. Apparently, your cold, rigid, dead body suddenly has a heartbeat, and now my interest is peaked.

“I have my team intercept the body, you. We bring you back here. As far as the world, the government, anybody knows, you don’t exist. You never did. So, now you’re mine.

“Once you got here, we had the best scientists and doctors watch over you 24/7. We had you hooked up to every type of machine you can possibly imagine. Not to fix you, but to understand how you are fixing yourself.

“Bones, organs, bullet holes, your respiratory, heart and oxygen levels, everything heals. It’s nothing less than impossible. The most amazing thing is what’s going on with your brain activity during this miraculous healing. Every single section of your brain, the temporal lobes, occipital lobes, parietal lobes, the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebrum, your brain stem through to your spinal chord, your entire internal system is humming on all four cylinders. Your brain is creating and distributing electrical currents that heal your body in six days.”

He looks at me hard and finishes with, “Don’t you find that miraculous?”, he asks.

After I don’t respond, he says, “I can’t help but wonder if you’re a hybrid.”.

“A hybrid?”, I ask.

“Got a better explanation?”, he asks. “We tested your DNA, you’re definitely human. Maybe they just have technologies where they can recode DNA without us being able to detect it.”.

“They?”, I ask.

“The working theory is that you either have alien blood, or lineage, or at least alien teachings. Others believe that a new technology may be further along than anybody knows about. Perhaps, they were able to introduce an AI, computerized molecule that stimulates the brain with perpetual, computerized learning mechanisms that generate the brain functions at high levels for long periods of time which could generate enough energy to heal your body. Or, your mom had sex with an alien. Either way, in my book, you’re a hybrid.”

I say, “What do you want?”.

CHAPTER 4

“Thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap…”, It’s pitch-black outside. The Black Hawk cruises ten yards above the ground at top speed over Isfahan, Iran. It’s been 23 years since I met Special Agent Edwards that day. I’ve been on thirty-three black op missions since.

I’ve died on two missions. Two blood bath missions. Nobody was left alive either time. It takes a tactical team to come get my body, because I may not be able to heal myself in the wrong conditions. Also, I lose my memory all over again when I die. They have to reteach me everything. Everything, except Fernanda. I always remember Fernanda. That year and a half never goes away.

I don’t know how many more missions I can do. I’ve aged just as much as everybody else over the last twenty-three years. My healing process is half as capable as it used to be. Like everybody else, I will eventually die. Forever.

I don’t know if God could love a killer like me, but I try to believe I’m doing the hard work of killing people who he would dislike even more than me.

Before I deploy, I always say a prayer:

“Dear Lord, please come whisper to me softly. It seems that maybe your dreams of true love appear to be lost on me. Constantly reminding me you’ve possibly forgotten me. My heart is heavy, like I’ve got the devil clogging life blossoming and it’s stalking me, like possibly these severed strings alive are still tossing me. This place has no friction. I can’t move or stop in this monotony, and it’s gotten me hating my own life is nothing more than your love lost on me. Promise me Lord please, just come talk to me.”

CHAPTER 5

I don’t care who you are, what your religion is, or what you believe about life after death. I can promise you one thing. If you are a bad person, bad enough for them to send me after you, then hell is not the worst thing coming your way.