Read Psychic Warrior Online

Authors: David Morehouse

Psychic Warrior (2 page)

BOOK: Psychic Warrior
13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
“The weather was bad on that one!” The voice was Mel's.
“How long have you been here?” I asked without looking up.
“A while. Bill wanted me to check in on you.”
“Which one were you?”
“Viewer Number 03, just like I am now.” He smiled gently. “That was a bad one. Bill tells me you knew one of them.”
“Yeah, I knew Chief Foley. We were sort of brothers for a few years.”
“Well, if it's any consolation, I know for a fact that he wasn't in any pain toward the end. He was confused—they always are—but he wasn't suffering.”
“Why couldn't they find them? Your sketches are outstanding! What was the problem?”
“Terrain, weather … Ecuadoreans … you name it. It's tough to get someone from another country to brave the elements to find somebody they don't know and didn't want there in the first place. We weren't really invited to that party. We kind of crashed their private border war, and when the chopper went down there was a less than enthusiastic response to our requests for a prolonged search.”
“So why didn't we launch our own?”
“Because there was a war going on and we weren't players. We weren't permitted to put U.S. troops on the ground
and swarm all over an already disputed terrain. It was a quagmire of politics and everything else bad. I'm sorry.”
“Ah, shit, Mel.” I snorted. “I don't mean—”
“I know you don't.”
I sat there staring at the folders, shaking my head in disbelief and bewilderment. “I wish I could bring this to closure somehow. You know? I'd just like to have been able to say good-bye.”
Mel drained the last of his cold coffee and made a face. Then he touched my shoulder. “You want to say good-bye? Meet me in the other building in- ten minutes, and you'll get to say good-bye.”
 
Ten minutes later I was standing in the viewing room facing Mel. “Adjust your environment and we'll get started,” he said. I adjusted the rheostat on the control panel next to the bed and found the lighting I wanted. Just as I had been taught in the preceding weeks, I took my place on the viewing platform, a specially designed bed like something from a science fiction movie. “Okay, I think I'm ready. Where exactly are you sending me?”
Mel had seated himself in the monitor's chair overlooking my position. He used the control panel on the desk in front of him to turn on the video cameras and tape recorder. “I'm giving you the same coordinates we used during the final missions on the aircraft. With luck you can pick up right where we left off eight years ago.” He looked down at his panel. “Ready?”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
“Your coordinates are seven, five, seven, four … eight, three, three, six.” Mel waited in the dim light for my first response.
As I had been trained to do, I cleared my mind and began the regimented procedure of entering an altered state. At first the sensation was relaxing, almost euphoric; but in minutes it began to accelerate. Vertigo overtook me and I felt drugged and confused. Seconds later, a tearing sound—it's like Velcro being torn open—ripped through my ears.
The separation had begun. Suddenly my phantom body rose out of its physical self and shot forward into space. The sensation of speed was overwhelming, and I kept my eyes closed, waiting for it to end.
Why and how all of this happened, nobody knew. The theories were complex and unclear. None of the viewers tried to understand the mechanics; they just braced for the ride and described what they saw when they arrived. And so I suddenly found myself suspended in the darkness of space, gazing down on the planet.
I began my descent into what was called the tunnel, falling faster and faster until the surrounding stars blurred into horizontal streaks of light and then a cylinder of energy. It was as if I were traveling through a tube of neon light at blinding speed. As I fell, the sides of the tunnel danced by hypnotically until my phantom body struck a membranelike substance: I'd arrived in the target area. I landed on all fours in a sticky haze, somewhere in time.
Mel was a skillful monitor who knew instinctively when the viewer had arrived at the target. “Tell me what you see, Dave.”
“Um, I don't see anything yet. It's foggy here … and hot … . It's hard to breathe.” I struggled to get my bearings and peer deeper into the haze. “It's very muggy here.”
“I understand,” Mel said. “But you need to move to where you can see. I'm going to give you a movement exercise. Pull back from the target to an elevation of five hundred feet. From there something should be visible.”
I concentrated on moving through the ether to Mel's designated spot. The mist blurred as I pulled back from the earth's surface and hovered. There.
Mel's voice penetrated the ether again. “Describe your perceptions now.”
“I see a white blanket of clouds covering the earth. There are points of jagged rock and foliage piercing the blanket. I can't see through the mist to the surface, though.”
“Okay, listen carefully. You haven't done this type of
movement before. You'll be okay; just follow my instructions. I want you to travel in time to a point when the surface is clear and visible.”
“How the hell do I do that?”
“Concentrate on the movement. It's no different from the others you've done. Concentrate on moving forward or backward in time until you see the surface below you.”
Straining, I tensed my neck, rolled my head backward, and closed my eyes. I began to feel something moving through me, like an energy fluid or an electrical charge. I rocked my head forward and opened my eyes to see time peeling off the earth day by day, the picture beneath me changing with each passing moment.
“Christ, that's unbelievable!” I shouted.
“Concentrate. You have to stop quickly when you get the picture you want.”
I watched in amazement. The terrain below me remained unchanged, but the cloud patterns flickered and strobed their way through time, changing like a rapid-fire slide show. I noticed the cloud cover beginning to dissipate, slowly chiseled away at its outer perimeter. Focusing carefully, I waited for the exact moment. “Okay, I got it! It's clear!”
I thought I heard Mel laughing at my novice enthusiasm, but I couldn't help it. This was like my first solo flight in an airplane—I was in control, but out of control.
“All right, start your movement to the surface. Go back to the coordinate site and tell me what you see.”
In an instant I was standing in a small clearing maybe thirty feet in diameter, surrounded by triple-canopy jungle. The trees towered around me in every direction, but through the undergrowth I could see another mountain in the distance. In the strange apparitional way one moves in the ether, I moved to the break in the undergrowth. My gaze fixed on the distant hills and rock formations; I lost track of the ground beneath me. At a break in the dense foliage, I paused to see what was around me. For some reason I looked down at my feet, only to find that I was
floating in midair, hundreds of feet above the next level of the jagged rocks. With my eyes locked on the distance, I had walked out of the jungle and straight off a ledge into thin air. “Shit!” I exclaimed, startling Mel.
“What? What's wrong?”
“I'm okay … . I'm okay. I just scared the hell out of myself there for a second, but I've got it now.”
“I want you to go to the crash site. Get control of yourself and concentrate; go to the crash site.”
“I'm moving there now—at least, that's where I think I'm going. I'm beginning to move pretty quickly.” The trees and undergrowth were flashing past me in an iridescent green blur. I began to experience vertigo again, that sickening feeling in my stomach boiling up until I thought for sure I would vomit.
Mel watched in amusement as my physical body grew pale and clammy. He had seen viewers bilocate to a target like this before. He had also seen them get sick before. “Concentrate on slowing down, Dave. You're moving too fast … . Slow down … . Keep your bearings.”
I tried as hard as I could to slow my progress, but it was like trying to stop a train. I kept moving at the same speed. My phantom body passed through anything that got in its way. When I hit small stuff, nothing happened; but when I hit bigger stuff, like trees and rocks, I felt as if a flat puff of air was hitting my face. It was the oddest thing I'd ever experienced. Everything I was perceiving began to darken, as if the sun were setting, but there was no longer any color, only gray and black. “Something's wrong!” I shouted. “Something's really wrong!”
“What? Tell me what you see.”
“Everything is turning dark … . Everything is …” I lost consciousness. My physical body lay there suspended between reality and the world I'd found in the ether. Mel left me to the silent world. He knew where I was; he'd been there.
I opened my eyes as the shroud of darkness slowly withdrew. It was an eerie feeling standing there in some other
world at some other time. I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or not; the images before me were there, but not there. If I looked at them too hard, they turned into something else. I could see the ground beneath my feet, but I couldn't feel anything. A light mist surrounded the place where I stood, thickening as it snaked back into the surrounding jungle.
A roughly triangular object caught my attention and I approached it in the darkness. It was about a foot across and maybe two feet wide at the base, with jagged edges as though it had been ripped from where it belonged. I reached out to touch it, and gasped as my hand passed through to the other side. “Damn!” I looked at my hand to see if it was intact.
Mel asked, “Would you like to tell me what happened?”
“I'm sorry. I tried to touch something, a piece of something, but—”
“You can't touch anything. There's nothing physical there. Don't waste time trying, it only confuses you. Look for your target, but also search within yourself; focus on the event you came to witness. Think about—”
“Wait!” I said. “Something's moving. Over there, near the edge of the jungle, where the trees get thicker.” I moved to where I thought the noise came from, where I saw something down low, glistening in the eerie light. It was an object much like the first one, only bigger. I stared at it, trying to make it out.
“That's all that's left,” said a voice from the mist.
“Who's there? Who said that?”
“The Indians carried most of it away. It took them about a year. Anything useful to them is gone now. Just as well … it served its purpose.”
A gaunt young man appeared in the mist some ten feet away from me. I could make out only his silhouette; nothing else was visible in the drifting haze. “Who are you?” I asked, squinting.
“Has it been that long for you, David?”
“What are you talking about? Been that long—?” And then it struck me. “Mike? Mike, is that you?” -
“I wondered what it would be like again … . I've come to you so many times, but you just don't remember.”
“I do remember—it's the dreams, right? You've come to me in the dreams, haven't you?” I moved closer to the figure. I stopped about three feet away from him, but he was no more clear than he had been at ten feet.
“It won't help you to get any closer. This is as perfect as we get to your eyes.”
“I can't see your eyes or your face.”
“That's because you haven't yet learned to see in this world. But you will. Those who came here before, they knew how to see. They watched us die. I felt them. I felt them in me and around me; they were very comforting. They helped me understand what had happened.”
“What did happen?” Boy, I felt stupid asking that. I'd walked into it just as I always did when he was alive. I could almost feel him grinning.
“Well, I died, of course.”
“Of course. But what happened—I mean, what happened to the chopper?”
“None of that is important anymore.” There was a long pause. “What's important is for us to say good-bye … and I love you. And thank you for taking care of Sharon all these years.”
“How—?”
“We see everything here. Forward, backward … everything. I watched you cry. I even watched your second daughter come into your world. I knew her before you did.”
Eight years of emotion welled up inside me, and I felt tears streaming down my face. “Oh, Jesus.” I wept openly, overcome by grief and happiness.
“It's okay, David. It's okay. Don't weep for me.”
“I'm not crying for you, you big ass. I'm crying because I miss you. You were my brother, and I miss you.” Mike stepped closer to me, and as he did I felt a warmth I cannot explain. He stood there close to me, watching me weep, and everything around me became lighter than before. It
was as if there were an unseen light or energy around him, and his being close to me let me inside its protective glow somehow. I looked up at him, and I could see his face, his wonderful loving face, just as I had seen him eight years ago.
BOOK: Psychic Warrior
13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

A Deep and Dark December by Beth Yarnall
Spying on Miss Muller by Eve Bunting
Linda Ford by Cranes Bride
Deep France by Celia Brayfield
The Perfect Proposal by Rhonda Nelson