Alien Caller (44 page)

“Each time it
was considered impossible for him to do it. He was moved from max
to super-max prisons. He was locked up in a single cell by himself,
usually chained for weeks at a time. Food was pushed through slots
under the door and no one was supposed to have any contact with
him. But each time the precautions failed. He got out of the cells.
Chemical restraints failed repeatedly. Shock collars didn’t work.
Chains seemed to magically open regularly by themselves, and of
course guards repeatedly let him out as they listened to his pleas.
He has the words of the devil in his mouth and the face of an
angel. People will do incredibly stupid things for him. And then he
went for the nearest victims he could find. Mostly the other
prisoners.”

He was shot
three times during that period, and each time he recovered fully,
the bullets apparently missing anything vital, and any surgeries he
needed done worked perfectly, while the doctors who removed them
all died at his hands in due course.

“In the end
each of the judges in turn finally ruled that he was just as
dangerous in prison as outside, and that even prisoners deserved
protection. His death was their only protection. A good lawyer at
the start might have got him life instead, but he didn’t have one.
Not after he killed the first one the state supplied.”

“In the glass
conference room, chained heavily, in front of the guards, he took
his lawyer’s pen and stabbed him through the eye, killing him
instantly. But at least his death was quick. It was what he needed
it to be to draw in his other victims. The first guard through the
door, he got with a chair, and then when he got his gun, three more
went down in a hail of bullets. But none of them were lucky enough
to die quickly. During the three hour stand-off that followed he
played with the four of them as only he could, all the while lying
to the negotiator. Pretending he wanted a helicopter and would
trade hostages. It was only when he had no bullets left that he was
retaken and the true horror of what he’d been doing was discovered.
The hostages were all dead, but for every second of the
negotiations they’d suffered as no one ever should.”

“It turned out
he’d never wanted a helicopter, or a lawyer. He didn’t consider
himself to be in any great danger, or his actions to be a crime.
Rather he considered the court the criminals for daring to judge
him. And anybody else who got in his way. After all he believed
himself a god.”

“He defended
himself in the trial, but it wasn't what you would call a defence.
Chained to a metal chair, heavily bandaged from his wounds when he
was recaptured, he proceeded to tell the entire world about how
much he’d enjoyed his reign of terror. About the way it felt so
good to see the life drain out of someone’s eyes, to feel the blood
running through his fingers, to hear the screams and enjoy the
taste of human flesh. But he wasn’t confessing, he was boasting.
Again it’s all on public record, though most of it is restricted
access due to the graphic nature of his testimony.”

And you should
know that when it came time to argue for his life, he refused. He
laughed at them. He told them to try. Dared them. He knew even then
that he was in no danger.

“Against any
amount of public protest the sentence was carried out. A tiny
little teenager, he was barely fifteen then, he was taken in chains
and strapped into the chair and the most deadly poisons were pumped
into his veins. He should have died. There should have been no way
he could have survived. He was even pronounced dead. But it never
happened. It never bloody happens.”

“The CIA saved
him first, changing the poisons and rewiring the equipment so he’d
survive, falsifying his death certificate, and whisking him away to
a secret base. They thought he’d be grateful, and the chance to
have a certified psychopath on their payroll was too good to miss.
They treated his illnesses, counselled him, and trained him as an
assassin. They thought they could control him, use him. They should
have known better. No one can ever control him.”

“The first
signs of trouble should have been when the judge, the jury, the
entire court and sheriff’s department, not to mention all the
witnesses at his trial, disappeared. And their families. Their
bodies popped up months later, one by one. All were brutally
murdered, after being horribly tortured, and they were all raped.
Their partners and children too. And the evidence, the DNA trail
lead straight back to him. You see he didn’t mind confessing to his
crimes, he doesn’t consider them crimes. But they had attempted to
try him, to pass judgement on him, on a god. Worse still they’d
chained him. They had locked him up, restricted him. None of those
things could ever be allowed.”

“Even when they
finally did figure out that he’d been out murdering more civilians
while they were still training him, the CIA still kept him alive.
Still trained him. Still tried to use him. And they hid his DNA
records to cover their tracks. It wasn’t just self-preservation,
though in truth they couldn’t afford for anybody to know they’d
kept him alive. Not when a hundred and eighty more innocent people
were dead because of it. There was also a desire to use him. They’d
spent a fortune on him, and they still thought they could control
him. Naturally he told them he’d be good, and they believed him.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary they believed him. They
always believe him.”

“It cost the
agency more than they would ever have imagined possible over the
next few years. He destroyed their operations, punished them for
saving him, and killed their own men, one by one. Sometimes more
than one at a time. Some of my friends were among them.”

“All the time,
he feigned innocence, and they couldn’t accept his guilt. It was
simply too monstrous. Too insane. He seemed so civilized, so
innocent, and even a dog knows better than to bite the hand that
feeds it. Even those who guessed it was him couldn’t prove it. He
was too cunning. And so his second reign of terror went on and
on.”

“Five years
later he was still a contract hitter for the CIA, and also making a
fortune selling national secrets on the side when we finally caught
him out. He was bright, fortune always favoured him, and he might
have got away with it, if we hadn’t turned an enemy agent. I turned
that agent. It wasn’t hard as the man was truly terrified of
Dimock. All he truly wanted was to be locked away somewhere safe.
He would have confessed to anything simply to get away from him. If
we’d had any sense we should have been just as frightened. But we
weren’t. We were fools.”

“From then on
his death was certain or so our bosses promised us. After all he
was just one young man barely even twenty. There was nothing
special about him then. How little we understood.

“More than
fifty men died trying to bring him in the first time. It was just a
simple little operation and back then he had only normal human
strength while we had military assault troops and the advantage of
surprise. The best of the best, all armed to the teeth. But he had
booby traps galore and weaponry beyond our wildest dreams. Weapons
the CIA had paid for. Weapons his enemies had attacked him with. He
fed them to us. I was the agency liaison for the operation. And I
was the one who had to tell the generals, my bosses and so many
grieving families how badly it had all gone wrong.”

“The initial
assault party was wiped out. He’d mined all the land around his
base for miles, and filled it with concealed automatic weapons, and
with that he herded us like sheep into a gully. There, with a dozen
concealed mini-guns he simply cut us down like tall grass from a
hidden bunker, laughing all the while. Of perhaps seventy soldiers
and myself, less than twenty of us made it back alive. And to our
eternal shame we had to leave our fallen behind, or die with them.
The only reason any of us made it out at all, was that he wanted to
wound us rather than kill us immediately. So he could have some fun
before we died. So he strafed our legs while we ran.”

“Those that we
had to leave behind and who didn’t die immediately, and there were
quite a few, he tortured for fun, while we regrouped in hospitals
and meeting rooms. He even sent video tapes of his kills to their
families. Graphic tapes which showed the things he did to their
loved ones. You cannot imagine the shame we felt and which we
deserved for that.” Which didn’t come close to the shame he felt
every time he saw any of the families after that, and then had to
ask them, practically beg them, never to tell anyone of what they’d
seen.

“After that he
disappeared, but not before he sent out a wave of parcel bombs
around the world, just for fun. He’d apparently decided that he no
longer needed to hide his deviancy. Not when the agency already
knew what he’d done. Thousands were killed and injured, most of
them completely unrelated to anyone he’d ever met. Housewives,
children and even vicars all paid the price of our failure. It
wasn’t revenge, or anger, or even blackmail. He just liked the
thought of killing total strangers. The only reason he stopped was
that it wasn’t satisfying enough. He couldn’t see and hear his
victims dying, feel their blood flowing between his fingers, or
taste their flesh. Seeing it on the news was good but not good
enough.”

“The second
assault two months later at his alternate base was an all out
offensive with hundreds of highly trained soldiers armed to the
gills and supported by major air and sea cover. Even that was
barely enough. And too many more good men never returned home. But
we got him. I only wish we’d killed him then and there. But we
didn’t. I didn’t. I’ll regret that till my dying breath. I had the
chance to kill him then, and I let him live. The army wanted him
tried and convicted for the loss of so many good men and the way
they had been tortured. The CIA, already in hot water and facing a
closed door congressional hearing for their role in his survival
after being executed, had to obey. So did I. Orders from the top.
But at least for a while, he was restrained. He was kept in chains
while he was tried and sentenced to death, for the second
time.”

“But once more
he cheated the death he was due, when someone from DARPA grabbed
him from the firing squad. For medical research so they claimed.
They promised he’d die, but that at least they’d get something from
him before then; medical information that could help our soldiers,
the understanding of what made him so dangerous. It wasn’t worth
the lives of those who’d already died, but it was something. Even
then I knew in my heart he’d escape. He’d cause more suffering. But
I so wanted to believe them. And I had to obey.”

“Unfortunately,
as with everything else, he didn’t die. Instead he was put in a
DARPA super-soldier programme and it worked. Of the hundreds of
prisoners in their trial, ninety-nine plus percent died, went mad
or were rendered permanently crippled. Dimock survived. He was the
only one. He even survived procedures which were meant to kill
him.

But he didn’t
just survive, he flourished. Every surgery, every treatment, every
drug, without fail he not only survived but benefited from. The
same as he had as a child in the hospital. It was as though he won
the state lotteries, not once, but seventy or eighty times in a
row. And that’s not in any public record. That’s the testimony of
those few that survived his original escape from their centre.
There were only a handful, and they never wanted to admit what
they’d done. But they also wanted new identities and safe places to
hide, and they knew he was coming for them, and so they spilled
everything they knew. I have copies hidden in my computer files.
They begged us to kill him. I only wish we had been able.”

With the
operations Dimock grew stronger than anything they’d ever expected.
Anything they could even believe possible. They had thought in
terms of him becoming a very strong man. But he wasn’t a man to
begin with and what he became was something far stronger and more
dangerous than any creature that had ever lived on Earth. And the
stupid scientists thought it was a triumph. He was their shining
golden child.” He wondered if they’d still thought that when he’d
rung their necks.

“Again they
thought they could control him no matter how strong he got. They’d
implanted control devices in him, and things that could kill him.
But when they finally tried using them in their desperation as
their friends were being murdered and tortured all around them,
they found they didn’t work. One by one they all failed, for no
known reason. The pain inducers which should have left him curled
up in agony on the floor didn’t work. They worked on everybody
else, but not him. Implanted bombs that should have turned his
heart and brain into Swiss cheese didn’t go off. The drugs he
needed to survive he either found elsewhere or stopped needing.
Poison gases which should have been totally lethal didn’t seem to
affect him. The chains they used he broke. Everything failed. The
scientists had thought they could control him. Instead they lost an
entire research facility as he escaped. Three hundred and seventy
four more people, butchered. All on tape as well. I have copies of
all those records as well.”

“Then, pursued
by agents from every covert organization in the country, he led a
trail of death and destruction across the States until he finally
escaped completely. Over two hundred more civilians were killed as
he stole cars, money and anything else he wanted. That too was
covered up and those who died were never given the true respect
they deserved. Instead of being admitted as true murder victims,
most were listed as killed in accidents. Coroners and police
departments were subverted, the press was locked up if they dared
put two and two together, and even the local politicians were ham
strung. But again I have the records.”