This choice: Infiltrate the military base. • Go Back...Chapter #3Infiltrate the military base. by: Seuzz   You trot back through the park, more or less the way you came, until you find yourself at the base fence. There you nose around until you find some soft ground you can tunnel through. After squeezing out the other side, you slink through the shadows.
A strong smell of smoke and singed metal hangs acridly in the air, and you follow it until you come to the ruins of the hanger. It is illumined by temporary floodlights, and you see the silhouettes of people moving outside and through it, shifting things about and calling out instructions to each other. You slink away.
You are constantly diving into corners in order to stay out of sight, but no one ever spots you. The conversations of passers-by are indistinct, and cryptic even when you can catch the words. You also never catch sight of anyone moving about by themselves; they are always in pairs or larger groups, so you don't have an opportunity to try possessing a human host. But then, you're not entirely sure how you'd go about doing that.
Eventually you find yourself by a small concrete building. You smell water nearby, and your sensitive wolf hearing detects a thin, metallic whining sound coming from it—water moving through pipes. Men are constantly going in, smelling of smoke and sweat when they do, but they are wet and mostly scrubbed of their stench when they exit. It must be the base showers, or one of them.
You toy briefly with the idea of infiltrating the showers, but decide instead to pad softly after one of the exiting groups of soldiers—they are probably heading back to the barracks for the night, and, sure enough, they disappear inside a long, low building. You creep behind some garbage cans and lay down. Now that it's come to the point, you're not sure that you will be able to exit the wolf, but you might as well try. You concentrate on the idea of moving outside your body, and are rewarded with a tickling sensation in the back of your throat. Suddenly, everything goes black, and you find yourself being expelled in a puddle.
You are back in your goo-like body, with a wolf nearby; you nose up close to check on it, and find that it is breathing but unconscious. You keep still as a few more soldiers enter the barracks, then creep in over the door jam. It's dark, and you can hear the creak of bed springs and rustling from low cots that line the walls, but there is no talking. You slither over to a nearby cot, twine yourself up the leg, and find yourself next to a human face. The man appears to be asleep, breathing softly through his mouth, so you carefully stick a pseudopod down his throat. He gags, and you hurriedly thrust yourself in. You are overcome with a sinking sensation.
You are briefly dizzy, and then you find yourself sitting up in bed, coughing heavily. "You okay, Liebrecht?" a low voice calls from a neighboring cot when you've recovered. "I'm fine," you mutter, and lay back down.
It's good to feel arms and legs again. Carefully you run your new hands over hard muscles and brush the buzz cut on your head. You stare up into the darkness. Liebrecht, you think. Kevin Liebrecht. Lance corporal. The fellow next to you is ... Vince Chalmers. Well, that's good. It takes a bit of effort, but you can read your new host's mind if you try. You try thinking of what he knows about the base and whatever was in the building that burned. Nothing very informative comes: Fort Suffolk is a small base, but Liebrecht has no duties connected to that building. You play with the idea of exiting the corporal and moving into someone else in the barracks, but decide to wait until morning and see what turns up.
So you close your eyes and try to fall asleep. Your limbs are very heavy, and your thoughts become sluggish, but at the same time you still feel very wakeful, even energetic. You wonder what is going on at your house, what your parents are thinking about your absence. Do they think you've gotten into trouble, or into an accident? Or do they think you're just off partying or goofing off with Caleb? Caleb ... A flash of anger burns through you again. The son of a bitch just ran off. You guess you can't really blame him. What could he do? Well, he could have stuck around and told someone that you were inside the burning building. Of course, you wouldn't really have wanted anyone to find you, not after what happened to you. Still, it wasn't a cool thing for him to have done.
As these thoughts are running through your head, you feel Liebrecht's own thoughts begin to veer off. They become disordered, and they tug at you. You see faces, but they don't mean anything to you. You have the sense that there is something that you needed to do today, something that was interrupted by the explosion and fire, but you can't put your finger on it. Maybe it doesn't matter. It can wait until tomorrow, probably ...
Suddenly, you are overcome with vertigo, and you lose all the sensation in your body. You briefly panic, wondering if you've been spontaneously expelled from his body, but then you are rocked by something like an explosion in your head. Thoughts and memories blaze before you. But they are not your own: they are Liebrecht's. Wonderingly, you reach out and grasp them, not singly, but all at once. The feeling of vertigo returns, but it's a delicious feeling; you feel as though you are becoming lost inside his mind. Where before his thoughts felt only like information, facts to be picked up and discarded, now they come with impressions and meanings. You remember fighting the fire, but now you also remember his excitement and fear. It was like the first time he had to run that obstacle course in basic training, but it was a real crisis, and he passed it, unlike the obstacle course, which—and you feel the shame of memory—he failed at badly.
You're startled by the free and easy way the thoughts and memories and associations are coming; you're not searching for them; they are simply bubbling up. You relax and simply let them come ...
And then the vision starts. You are standing by a road, alone, in the middle of a desert landscape. There is a dust devil in the distance, and then it suddenly resolves into a bus. The bus comes to a stop where you are standing, and then you are inside it. A man is there—Liebrecht's brother. But his brother died in an accident three years ago. A wave of tenderness and regret washes over you.
You realize that Liebrecht is dreaming, and now you understand what must have happened. You are awake, but Liebrecht has fallen asleep. That must be why you no longer have a sense of sight or touch. His falling asleep must have also pulled you deeper into his mind and given you better access to its contents. You can still feel those thoughts and memories, even outside the dream, and as the dream unfolds you surf through them. A birthday, a graduation, the afternoon in high school when he lost his virginity. You let yourself sink deeper into him, letting the dreams and memories and all their associations wash over and into you.
* * * * *
Time doesn't pass any more quickly for being inside a sleeping mind, and even as his memories and impressions attach themselves to your own, you occupy the time with seeing what you can do inside his head. His long-term memories (anything that is more than a day or two old) are impermeable, but you find you can erase or alter or rearrange newer memories, and can even invent some. So, for instance, you erase the horrific memory he has of a goo-like snake forcing itself down his throat.
The hours of respite and exploration are eventually cut short, however. Liebrecht is in the midst of a dream about hunting with a friend when it suddenly vanishes in a shout. You can't see or feel anything, but his thoughts, though muzzy, are suddenly much more disciplined. He is looking for his socks and his trousers and boots, and then you sense that he is concentrating on his bed. Someone tells him to stand back and get out of the way; he responds with a jocular oath. None of this happens under your control.
You reach out, trying to find some way out of the recesses of his mind, and then the barracks swim into view. You are staring down at his pillow, which is nicely tucked up on top of sheets and blankets that have themselves been pulled tight. You are frozen in place, trying to figure out what you know and what you can do.
"Pull the nails out of your boots, Liebrecht," a voice barks, and without thinking you snap to attention and sweep a hand over the last few wrinkles on the bed. The sergeant—God damn him, the thought forms easily in your head—is already on to his next victim.
"You'd think after last night they'd let us sleep in a bit," Chalmers mutters behind you.
"It's not a day camp," you retort without thinking. "You want a nice, long vacation, make a pass at the lieutenant." You are briefly startled by the ease with which you replied to Chalmers, then realize that your complete physical control of Liebrecht has not cost you the easy command of his mind that you acquired during his sleep. Half a leer creeps up the side of your face as you realize that you will be able to play the part of the corporal perfectly.
* * * * *
The day passes quickly because you are kept busy moving equipment out of the burned-out hanger and demolishing the remnants. You banter coarsely with Liebrecht's friends, and during the lunch break enjoy a ribald and profane—and explicitly detailed—talk about what you and your buddies will do during your next R&R break in the town. But beneath the play-acting you stay alert for chances to find out more about what happened, and for hosts that might get you closer to the heart of things.
That afternoon you note a colonel and a captain who seem to be in charge of things. They don't supervise the clean up directly, but they are omnipresent, watching the progress carefully. You keep close to the part of the hanger ruins where you think you had found the jar of blue liquid, and are rewarded with the discovery of some glass shards. You're bending over them, examining them, when the colonel materializes and brusquely orders you off to another section of the wreckage. As you look back, you see that he is bending over your find and carefully scooping the bits into a plastic bag. During the break for dinner, you make an excuse to duck out early and take the long way back to the PX, keeping an eye out for the colonel. You spot him and, as casually as you can, follow him back to his office. Having marked its location, you swing over to the PX and buy a couple of comic books and some gum.
Back in the barracks, the sergeant gruffly congratulates the men on the job they did on the clean up, and then picks out a couple and gives them passes into town for the night and the next morning. You're not among them, but Chalmers is. The latter grins at you.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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