Rise Of The Wicked One-Part 4

Jackson sat in the cantina, a place built for the crew to gather and unwind. The majority of level 1D was recreational. It was part of the design for the site.

Sitting there, staring at the fish, Jackson sipped from a glass of whiskey. It was his first time having a drink or socializing since coming aboard the rig. After nearly two weeks, he finally understood why they put a cantina aboard an ocean rig. Under normal circumstances, the detention unit would be exhausting.

He hadn’t gotten much from her since the announcement that she was first locked away in the later part of the eighteenth century. That was enough to keep him occupied the past couple of days. Jackson believed her story. The files on her went back to before Jack The Ripper. Sitting there, sipping from his glass, he started scouring the old files, going back year after year.

She first appeared in the files from the archives of the Metropolitan Police Service. LeeLee first appeared in 1855 as the witness to a homicide. Before that, a young woman about the same age was reported in a police file by a different name. Over the years, there were similar sightings recorded from London to Rome. Jackson began to think his subject to be far older than the years she was on lockdown.

“Can I join you,” said a voice from behind the file he was holding.

Jackson lowered the file. His eyes moved upward to the cute brown-eyed smile before him. Motioning to the other side of the table, he nodded.

“So, are you settling in well?” asked Annette.

Jackson put the file down and picked up his glass. Dr. Harvey looked different in scrubs. She was still stunning. Now, she looked like a doctor instead of a paratrooper.

“All things considered, I have had worse accomodations,” answered Jackson.

“Really? Like where?”

Jackson had traveled to some of the most famous places on the globe. He had time in Mogadishu, Algiers, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Poland, England, Central America, and Columbia. Most of the places he traveled to weren’t on his passport. The doctor needed to settle for being curious. He couldn’t explain if he wanted to, no matter how attractive the doc might be.

“You’ve been around,” she commented.

“Unfortunately,” sighed Jackson.

Jackson took a sip of his drink, thinking about his past encounters and the one that sent him into hiding. Swirling the ice around in the steamy liquor, Jackson looked into the eyes of the curious doctor. He wondered what the occasion was. What brought the doctor out with the roughnecks, the security staff, and the crew?

“After a few days of sitting in my suite alone at night, I finally decided I’d had enough solitude.”

“Is that it?” asked Jackson.

“Well, there was this guy I hoped to see here. We flew in together and didn’t get to chat much,” answered the doctor.

Jackson laughed. The idea of a romance aboard a black site disguised as an oil rig was humorous. After being alone for several years, Jackson didn’t know what the future held for him. There was the possibility that he’d have to disappear again.

“We’re here now,” he told her, raising his glass.

The two clinked their glasses together and enjoyed a drink, Jackson keeping his hand on the files he brought with him. The girl was classified, and the doctor wasn’t allowed on the detention level. Considering what he believed about the girl, telling the doctor anything, even in confidence, didn’t make sense.

“Tell me about yourself,” Jackson suggested.

It was after ten when Jackson started making his way toward his suite. His time with the doctor was fun. Jackson had to get ready for his next interview session before tomorrow. They agreed to get dinner and talk about work over drinks. Jackson didn’t know when, but the idea was exciting.

When he stepped onto the lift, Jackson leaned against the tube. No matter what, all he saw was LeeLee’s face. In his mind, the sound of her voice echoed the words “more than 100 years.”

Jackson went into his suite, kicked off his boots, and put his feet on the coffee table in front of him. He looked to his left, seeing a shark swim by his viewport. That was the last thing he saw before fading off.

The night shift security officer sat in the control room watching the monitors. There was one job, watching the girl known as Prisoner X. Stephen sipped from a cup of coffee, carefully watching the monitors and checking the biometrics. Everything was in normal ranges, so he turned the dial on a control switching the view to a game.

Stephen was a baseball fan. He liked watching the Cubs play, even though they were back on track to a lengthy, record-making run of losses. Born and raised in Chicago, Stephen was a die-hard Chicago sports fan.

As he sipped his coffee and watched the game, Stephen occasionally checked the biometrics to be sure the girl was still asleep. Stephen found the girl boring, even though she was attractive.

Watching the game, the cubs were down by two in the bottom of the seventh. Stephen slipped some Irish creme into his coffee and turned back to the monitors. He watched as the last batter of the inning struck out, costing the team a two-run hit. As he cursed about them losing again, something caught his eye.

Putting his cup down, Stephen flipped through the camera views. As the only one in the detention area, his uncertainty was reasonable. Stephen didn’t know if he was imagining seeing something move past the control booth or if something had. Curiosity was too much for him, so he grabbed a flashlight and sidearm.

Walking into the exterior corridor, the sound of his heart beating the only thing he could hear, Stephen turned and started around the outside of the detention floor. Twenty feet from the control booth, he turned down a corridor leading into the detention area. Stephen knew there should only be two other people on level 5 staffing the detention center after 2300 hours. Security at the sentry station would announce any additional personnel.

Putting his hand on the palm scanner, he entered the main detention area with his sidearm raised. The scanners showed LeeLee in her bunk, but someone could be trying to get to her. His mind raced with possibilities. The security staff didn’t know much about Prisoner X. They knew that only Professor Cross had access to the girl, and her file was classified.

Walking into the detention area, he found a control panel and hit several numbers. Stephen entered a code changing the controls on the glass. As the gray shadowing disappeared and the view of the detention cell cleared, Stephen’s heart beat faster.

A force pulled him from the glass, thrusting him against the steel-framed wall behind him. Stephen’s body hit hard, knocking the wind from his lungs. He slumped to the floor, barely catching himself before hitting his head. He didn’t know if what he saw was real. LeeLee stood at the barrier, her hands on the glass.

He watched her hands, blurry as they were. Her hands appeared to vibrate against the glass. Slowly, he watched her float through the glass, stepping off the platform. Her bare feet touched the steel flooring as she came to a stop. LeeLee looked at Stephen, her dark eyes turning completely black.

LeeLee approached Stephen, and he shuddered, fearing the change in her look. She stood over him, and he felt the power emanating from the girl. Stephen tried to call for help. He keyed his radio, hearing nothing but static.

“Base, come in base,” he begged over the radio.

Nobody heard his pleas, and the girl just stood over the top of him, staring down through hauntingly black eyes.

She held out her hand at him, her palm outstretched. Winds blew around her, whipping her hair and forcing Stephen off the ground, his body sliding against the steel wall he had bounced off. Stephen shook with fear, looking down at the floor, seeing his Sig out of reach. His head turned toward the girl, his lips trembling and his arms pinned against the steel.

“God help me,” cried Stephen, now completely upright and powerless to do anything but stay there, suspended off of the floor. “What are you?”

The girl didn’t say anything as she approached Stephen. She looked him in the eyes, the tip of her nose near touching his. The girl breathed in his scent. She licked the side of his face, tasting the fear emanating from him.

“What are you?” she questioned.

Stephen looked at her. The question was weird, and he felt compelled to answer. Then he realized she was repeating his question.

“You first,” he replied.

It was after 0300 when Jackson woke up in his bunk. The alarms sounding on level four brought him out of a nightmare, causing him to jump out of his bunk. He reached into the nightstand, grabbing his Glock. Jackson sat there, getting his wits about him, before calling the command center.

“This is Cross,” he told the person on the other end. “What’s going on?”

Jackson listened to the person on the call explain that the alarms were coming from the detention unit. He was briefed on what they knew, which wasn’t much. One of the entry guards went to the booth and found Stephen Wardlow on the ground inside the detention cell chamber.

Jackson put on a pair of jeans and a polo. He slipped on his boots and headed toward the lifts. Once he was on the detention level and cleared to go to the chamber, Jackson ran the rest of the way until he found the night shifters standing at the entrance. They stopped him from rushing into the detention chamber.

“Professor, you don’t want to go in there,” they told him.

Jackson pushed past the burly security staff and made his way to the palm reader. Stepping inside the chamber, he stopped in the doorway. What he saw was impossible to describe. Stephen Wardlow’s body was lying on the steel. Doctor Harvey was there, examining the remains.

“Christ!” he said. “What the hell happened to him?”

Annette stood up, shrugging her shoulders, as she stepped away from the body. She was ghost white and holding a hand over her mouth. Stephen followed her out into the corridor.

“Doc?”

“I don’t know what happened. There’s nothing I can say that would explain that,” explained Doctor Harvey.

Stephen’s arms were lying on the floor ten feet from his body. They looked torn from the shoulder sockets. Stephen’s skin was missing, peeled away from his corpse. His tongue ripped out of his mouth, and his throat crushed.

Joe Campbell came out of the detention chamber breathing heavily. He struggled to keep from vomiting. Seeing one of his coworkers eviscerated like that shook him to the core. Joe had never seen such violence or carnage.

“Doc, do you have any ideas?”

“We’re in the deep ocean, a thousand feet below sea level, and if I didn’t know that, I’d say it was an animal attack,” explained Doctor Harvey.

“There aren’t any animals aboard. Try again,” demanded Joe.

“Easy,” Jackson told him.

“Look, I can’t tell you guys what attacked officer Wardlow. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human,” she announced.

Jackson’s mind stopped. At that moment, he realized there was a suspect they hadn’t considered. He pulled Joe toward the booth.

“You have to pull up the video from the chamber,” Jackson demanded.

“Why?”

“We need to see if the girl got out somehow,” explained Jackson.

Joe looked at Jackson, puzzled. He demanded to know what Jackson wasn’t telling him. Joe looked into the chamber, seeing the blackout shading around the cell. Joe rolled back the video footage, looking at Jackson, still waiting for answers.

“I could tell you why I think it might have been the girl, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

Joe snapped at Jackson. One of his men was lying in pieces on the floor, and he was holding back. It was unacceptable. As he sat there, watching the footage of the past four hours, Jackson explained what he was doing on the rig. Then he recounted how the files go back to the first part of the 19th century.

“You’re saying she’s not…”

“Human?” asked Jackson.

“What the hell is she then?” demanded Joe.

Jackson didn’t know how to answer the question. He knew Stephen Wardlow shouldn’t have been in the chamber, much less alone. The two men stood in the booth, watching Stephen enter, searching the area around the chamber. When Stephen flew against the wall, both men jumped. They watched the video, seeing the officer slump against the ground. Watching the action, they both turned their heads as his body began to rise against the wall. Nothing they were seeing could explain what happened.

“It wasn’t her,” said Jackson, relieved.

“Then what was it?”