The next time Julian came to, he was more prepared. He stayed quiet, he didn’t move or open his eyes, he tried to keep his breathing as slow as possible. He just listened to the deafening whud whud whud of what must’ve been a helicopter. Admittedly, going from his rocking, dipping afterlife boat to the stomach-dropping plunge of returning to life and now to a swaying, bobbing helicopter had been a nausea-inducing trip. The nausea was aided swiftly by the growing sense of dread over what had transpired. Upsilon being invaded. His teammates killed. Had the attackers freed Lady Helga? Was he in their grasps now?
He had to regulate his breathing or they’d—
“He’s alive again.” Through the pounding of the helicopter blades, he could hear the woman’s voice, as commanding as it had been on the floor of the ruined Upsilon base. “Jha, Xing, on him. Alright, Blake. You’re going to do what I say, when I say, and nothing more than I say. Otherwise, you get another bullet and we wait until your brain knits itself back together, hopefully enough to follow orders.” Her voice was accented, Indian if he wasn’t mistaken, probably a specific regional accent but he wasn’t about to make a guess. His heart sank. It was possible that they were North American agents, but between the accent and names, there was compelling evidence that this was Iota Group, the Southeast Asian division. If Iota Group had been called in to respond to the attack on Upsilon, then had the North American group truly been wiped?
“Alright. We have an ID card with your photo on it, stating your name as Julian Blake. Is this correct? Have you gone by any other names in the past? Speak succinctly and clearly.”
“Yes. No.”
“Alright.” He heard the blarp of a radio and the woman spoke again. “Laghardi to Omicron. Prisoner has confirmed his identity as Julian Blake. Continue running the visual for matches, see if you can’t find something.”
Ah, yes, it made a little more sense. He was an immortal, their sworn enemy. The scourge of the Earth. The reborn, the everliving, the blight. Julian had never entirely understood why the organization had cast such a damning light over every immortal. The ones they’d IDed, well, their actions spoke for themselves but Julian always wondered if a ‘good’ immortal couldn’t exist, one who was simply scared of dying. However, since his own experience, the peace and tranquility, the acceptance of death, he understood it now. Only someone with the intent to defile that sacredness could truly turn back their boat.
Or someone as stupidly curious as Julian. In the past, the only people who sought the image of the bridge were those who wanted to escape it. Now with a well funded, scientific and militarized organization dedicated to defeating the immortals, it was only natural that an imaging of the river would fall into the hands of someone who was simply curious. And also probably just simple. Julian had really screwed up.
“What was your position within Upsilon?” Laghardi asked.
Was. That wasn’t a good sign. “R&D. Researching methods to kill the immortals.”
She gave a long sigh. “And yet you are immortal yourself.”
Did that count as a question?
“That was a question.”
Ah. “That’s new.”
“So you are newly immortal? Were you part of the destruction of the Upsilon Group?”
His heart finally sank the last few inches it could. Destruction, not attack. Upsilon was no more.
“Yes, newly immortal. No, not part of the attack.”
By now Julian’s senses were fully about him. There was a cloth over his eyes, so even if he opened them, he’d be blind. His hands and ankles were cuffed behind him, rendering him completely immobile.
“Alright. Video will confirm that. Jha, thoughts?”
A new voice, also Indian but male, spoke up. “He was shot in the head. Preliminary video recovery shows him speaking to Lady Helga’s agent for some time before turning his back on her. That’s all we have so far. His fingerprints were all over the computers. However his phone was in the final stages of initiating Protocol Lockdown.”
The report was clipped and professional. Julian couldn’t tell a thing about what Jha actually thought of him.
“Is it possible he was stopping anyone else from initiating the protocol?” Laghardi asked. “Took the phone?”
“His credentials were entered in. And from the video… no, it doesn’t look likely, Colonel.”
“Very well. Xing, take his mask off. I have a few images to ask him about.”
Let there be light. Julian squinted into the surprising bright interior of the helicopter. For some reason, he’d pictured a tiny stealth chopper, slinking through the night, not the rather large interior of a military transport helicopter.
The woman who’d taken his mask off was a young, blank faced Chinese soldier. Her uniform was emblazoned with a looping letter ‘I’, the symbol of the Iota Group. As she backed away, Julian got his first glimpse of the Colonel, a broad shouldered, dark skinned woman who looked maybe his age, mid 30s. A scar ran across her cheek, distorting her upper lip slightly. Her dark eyes pierced him as she pulled out a tablet.
“Identify the following.”
The identification game was the hardest task Julian had ever undertaken. Identifying his coworkers by the various pictures taken of them at death put to shame any all-nighter, any thesis, any test, anything. Some of them he didn’t know by name and watching the Colonel swipe their pictures away, as casually as a teenage girl on a dating app, boiled his blood. Each name grew harder in his throat. He never wanted to see Zack, the receptionist, crumpled like that. Never wanted to see Jenny from Surveillance’s face so pale, so bloodless. If he hadn’t worked with Clark, he may have misidentified him, what with half his head blown away. As each face was swiped past, a little spark of hope extinguished. Rahul’s face, the blood shoddily wiped away. Corks’ mouth dropped open in a shout or a command or a scream. Finally, Annie’s face, eyes closed, face screwed up. Her glasses were still on her face, slid down her nose.
Julian wanted to push them back up but his hands were cuffed and it was just a picture and she was dead anyway. They all were. He should have been.
“You’re crying.” The Colonel’s voice was unfeeling.
“Those were my coworkers. My friends.” He tried to sniff back the tears that were about to spill but no amount of will could stop them. What did it matter anyway? “What happened?”
She regarded him. “If you must know, the followers of Lady Helga launched an attack on Upsilon Group headquarters. They infiltrated the furnace rooms, took out the technicians, superheated as many of the furnaces as they could to get them to shut down, suppressing the alarms.” The Colonel looked down at her tablet. “Apparently you had a protocol to prevent more than four from shutting down?”
“Yes. Two had to stay active.” It had seemed so foolproof.
“So then you entered furnace room F3 and booted up one of the furnaces, thereby triggering the system to register three active furnaces and allowing another to be deactivated?”
“They were suppressing the alarms! I didn’t know that there were others that had shut down and the technician had a reasonable excuse for why hers was shut down.” His head hurt. They had forced his body into a sitting position on one of the seats, but he’d been clamped so harshly in place that the floor would probably be more comfortable. At least he could stretch out.
“What was her excuse? I assume that, by the technician, you’re referring to this woman?” The Colonel pushed her tablet back in front of his face again, this time showing a zoomed in picture of the harried brunette who had shot him in the head.
“Monica. I mean, probably not Monica. I should have asked for her ID but I didn’t think about it. You just don’t think about that.”
Her eyebrow slowly arched up, giving him a generous three seconds to amend his statement before reaching the brim of her cap. “You just don’t think about that?”
Sure, in the militaristic divisions, maybe they asked every Dick, Tom, or Harry to show a badge every time they did anything. Maybe they did. But that just wasn’t how office work functioned.
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“No. You don’t. You get an alert from the furnace saying a vent is being funny. With five to spare, you don’t think to card everyone you run into just in case one of the oldest immortals on the planet is launching an attack.” He clamped his eyes shut, but was greeted by the swimming faces of his coworkers. “That’s just not—It should be but it’s not what we expected. It was our two year anniversary.”
Before she could answer, her radio chattered. “Omicron HQ to Laghardi.”
She pulled it to her lips. “Laghardi, go.”
“We’re rerouting you to Omicron Fleur. The coordinates have already been sent to Officer Schmidt.”
Her heavy eyebrows furrowed and Julian’s was sure his looked similar, if not a fair deal paler and less intimidating. Omicron was the European group. Why had a bunch of Iota agents responded to the burning Upsilon Group, only to be rerouted to Omicron? And not even Omicron HQ but rather Omicron Fleur, likely a satellite office.
“Why are we going to Omicron?”
“I didn’t ask you to speak. Do we need to gag you?” She stalked past him to the back of the helicopter, out of his vision. “Lapinsky, have you spotted anything?”
“You would be the first to know, I’m sure.” This new voice was affected with a slight accent, but unlike most of the various asian accents he’d heard, this one sounded eastern European.
“I want to know if we’re being followed. What do you know about Fleur?”
“Research facility but it has a backup holding cell on the very extreme chance that Omicron ever got another immortal.” The voice was quiet and Julian strained to make it out over the noise of the helicopter. “I suppose it could function if any group got more than one. We just seem to be bad at that. We get this one, we lose Lady Helga.”
So he was going to lockdown. To a cell. A ‘holding cell’. His skin grew damp with sweat. What did it feel like to have your soul starved out? His second death had passed a lot quicker; he’d just rowed his boat straight off the side. What would happen if he fell but his body couldn’t reconstruct? Did he just fall forever? For years? Or was it black. Would he be able to breath? He’d never felt bad for the immortals in holding cells because they’d chosen that life but suddenly the idea of ‘living’ forever in half death terrified him more than anything.
“No.”
“What was that?” The Colonel swooped down, eyes fixated on him. “What did you say?”
“I said, no.” The word wasn’t as forceful or brave as Julian thought it would be when he first formed it with his lips. No, it was a quiet little sound, full of trembles and barely biting back a sob. “Please.” This word, at least, he’d had no delusions over how it would sound in his mouth. It was a beg.
“No?”
“I don’t know what that’s like. I’d never thought of it, I—” How could he convince her not to put him in a cell? It was more than his life at stake here. “I never should have been immortal. I should have died, I should have died with the rest of them.”
Her heavy eyebrows arched dangerously downward. “So you’re officially claiming that you only achieved immortality at the destruction of the Upsilon Group?”
“That’s it. Yes. That. I’m R&D. We’re supposed to be finding a way to kill the immortals so we created a hypothesis on how the afterlife looked.” His words tripped over themselves in a waterfall of desperate confusion and wheedling so piteous that even Julian would have given himself an eyebrow raise. “I just… I died. I got curious. I came back. I’m stupid, I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s that easy.” She wasn’t having it.
“Well you have to know, you know?” Despite himself, Julian’s heart picked up at the idea of an audience genuinely interested in his work. “So most souls drift based on instinct. You lie and just wait until you’re assigned to the great… whatever, right?”
“Sure.”
“Right, but if you know what you’re going to find, that sort of knowledge can pre-prepare you. It’s a phenomenon you can study in most people. If I were to show you a patterned rug or wallpaper, you really wouldn’t consider it. On instinct most people would pass it by.” There was the distinct possibility that he was going too far with his analogy, but he had to try to explain this. “But if I tell you, before you even go into the hotel, ‘the names of the residents of each room is detailed on the carpet and wallpaper outside their rooms’ suddenly you’d pay attention. It’s important to note, you don’t necessarily need to want to break into a room to pay attention to the pattern. You just have to be curious.”
“So the afterlife is a hotel.”
“It’s a river. A waterfall.” For a moment, he felt the peace of being surrounded by the mist that hovered over the flowing water, and a poorly timed smile crossed his face. Her glare shot the smile back into the recess of his face. “Right. It’s a river. And I knew it would be so when I saw I was right, I kinda—” He stopped himself before saying ‘had a nerdgasm’. That language may have passed with Annie but wouldn’t here. His energy deflated slightly as he pictured her jamming her glasses up her nose and admonishing him for ‘geeking out’ and diluting his point. “I got excited. And curious. And I explored a bit and accidentally fell off the river.”
There appeared to be a half dozen potential lines of question floating beneath the surface of the Colonel’s face, fighting for oxygen. Finally she narrowed her eyes. “The others on your team all died. We have empirical evidence that they are still dead. Why did you survive? Were the other scientists not curious?”
Julian winced. “They were. They were some of the most curious, inquisitive people I know. But they were curious as to what lay beyond.”
“Beyond life?”
“Beyond the waterfall. The edge of the river. If they sat up in their boats and looked around, they’d have raced the other boats to the end, to the—” The tears swimming in his voice finally broke him. “I bet they did. I couldn’t have held them back if I’d wanted to. I was just a lot more concerned with that bridge. From the moment of death to the beginning of forever. That was my specialty back in Upsilon.”
There in her eyes, for a second, he saw the slightest shine. Maybe part of what he’d said had gotten through. It certainly had gotten through to him. If this helicopter crashed right here, right now, the Colonel, the soldiers, the pilot, they’d all be moments from wherever Annie, Clark, and Rahul were. Julian would just wake up, broken, a few hours later.
“There will be time for further interrogation at Omicron Fleur. For now, just stay still.” She stood up, inhaling deeply.
“I’m too tied up to do anything but,” he muttered.
The others in the helicopter must have been more attuned distinguishing voices over the roar. While he barely heard his own voice, he could see Xing, the chinese agent, roll her eyes and he heard Lapinsky, the european agent, snicker.
“Enough from all of you,” snapped the Colonel, not missing a thing. “Do not let your guards down.”
The helicopter traveled for some infinite amount of time. An ex had once bought him a helicopter tour of the city but they’d been weathered out and she broke up with him a few weeks later, skipping town with the voucher. That had been his closest encounter with a helicopter before now. He couldn’t help but think that that trip may have been more pleasant.
The Colonel held up a hand after what felt like forever and pressed into her headset. “Alright, we’re approaching Fleur. Prepare for landing.”
Julian heard a soft ‘aww’ from behind him, ostensibly from the European agent.
“Matti,” murmured the Indian agent, eyeing the Colonel apprehensively.
But she didn’t miss a thing. “Were you hoping we’d be shot down, Lapinsky? Flying with the most newly discovered Immortal isn’t exciting enough?”
“Perfectly exciting, ma’am. Just would have given us some additional intel if we’d been followed. The absence of a tail doesn’t say much.”
“Hmm. Well, our luck is sure to fail eventually, so you may get to see your attack party yet. Fasten in for landing and keep your eyes peeled.”
“Like an apple.”
The Colonel winced at this and turned to ensuring Julian’s straps were secure before posturing herself next to him and holding tight to a rail.
Julian braced for the airplane-style landing he’d, understandably, come to associate with any aircraft landing. His whole body had remained tense, perhaps a bit much so but he had plentiful reasons to be tense, for several minutes, before the thudding of blades stopped. For a moment, he expected the aircraft to plunge, but instead, a broad shouldered man stuck his head back from the cockpit.
“We’re ready to disembark, Colonel.” His accent was so German, it was almost comical. “Major Vicci is en route with an armed squadron to escort the prisoner to his cell.” These words erased any comedy from the situation and Julian’s shoulders sagged.
“Copy that, Officer.” She tapped her headset. “Laghardi to Vicci, we’re standing by for escort.”
Julian was pretty sure he’d be shaking if he had a spare inch to move. If they brought him straight to a true Immortal holding cell, he’d never wake up. No one would save him, he didn’t have any rabid followers like the other Immortals, and they’d have no reason to ever free him. Maybe the base would become overrun or shut down or climate change would melt the entire mountain range and he’d finally come back to life in a desolate, lonely post apocalyptic world, joined only by the other psychopathic Immortals, who would battle over the ashes of Earth until the sun ate it.
If he could just have a moment or two of their time, for some kind of interview, some Q&A bit, anything, he could try to plead his case.
“Colonel,” he said. His wavering voice confirmed that he should, in fact, be trembling, and he knew his clothes were drenched in sweat despite the chill air.
“You’ll have time to speak when we bring you to an interrogation chamber.” There was something behind her eyes other than cold apathy. Something even more than hard intellect, though both were there. Something that made him think maybe he had a chance. He just needed to hold his tongue and they’d hear him out.
“Alright. Alright. I swear, I didn’t attack Upsilon. I didn’t plan that. I didn’t order that. I’d have had no reason to. Those were my coworkers, my friends. Annie and I were supposed to grab drinks Friday with Lea and Coswell from S&E.” His voice broke a bit and he cursed himself for the blabbing but he couldn’t keep his thoughts straight. Everyone around him was some top tier military personnel, used to being in the line of fire, used to keeping cool, used to interrogations. Julian got nervous playing trivia at the bar.
Everyone grew tense at his bit of verbal vomit, clutching weapons.
The Colonel got up in his face, her face warped into a heavy frown. “You speak when spoken to. We understand your situation and your claims. Shut up until we get you to iso.” She paused and Julian could just barely hear the radio chatter from her headset. Then she stood up. “Major’s here. Move out.”