The Mission Is Never Over—Awakening

From the movie Enemy.

 

December 15

Wren was still reviewing Patrolman Revett's encounter with Gina Bullock when Gina actually called. She and Emily were flying back to Birmingham later that day, but first they were going to fill up on breakfast at the Red Fox Inn. She invited Wren and her team to join them, an offer Wren leapt on.

Up at Indian Rocks, Rex and Malachi were not having such an easy morning. Malachi's head felt like it was going to explode; Rex's camelhair coat had spontaneously caught fire, leading him to stop-drop-roll in the thawing mud; and both realized the other was somehow responsible for their predicament. Unnaturally responsible, even. Malachi drew his pistol on Rex, who crabwalked backwards into the abandoned pickup truck: he was convinced Malachi had been the one to attack first, but that wasn't something to quibble over with his life on the line. Wren saved Rex's life by calling Malachi at that moment, offering to pick them up.

In the car, Rex and Malachi both gave Wren thousand-yard stares, with Rex additionally covered in mud and smelling of smoke. They related what they had all learned: Malachi realized that a crackpot theory he had heard, of the earth once being home to titanic beings called the Great Old Ones, was actually true, and that the Mother in the ocean was one of them. It shook him to realize he had devoted his life to educating people about the natural world when the "natural world" was in fact the byproduct of Unnatural alien visitations.

For his part, Rex was unusually somber during the drive. He recognized the "arachnoid mater" Gina had spoken of as a medical term, a membrane surrounding the brain; the term meant "mother in the image of a spider," the significance of which he didn't like to think about. His mood did not improve when Wren asked him to try and be "normal" during the breakfast, nor when he the tug towards the mountain return, this time accompanied by additional tugs like guitar strings vibrating in parallel. One extended from the mountain to Malachi; one past them both into town, towards Gina; and one far to the southwest, towards Alabama.

Rex's idea of "normal" was to pretend to be a teacher of high school math, but Emily wasn't convinced, especially after a cockroach fell off him and scurried into her clothes. She and Gina described other disappearances affecting an online community Gina was part of: three members of the Facebook group Bham Bell & Shadow had reported a spontaneous urge to drive southwest from Birmingham late at night, then had their memories suddenly stop upon reaching unfamiliar little towns; they came to the next morning wandering the streets. Emily provided the names of all three women but refused to address anything strange about Gina's case. Wren called Aaron, an old friend in the occult underground, asking him to look into the group and get back to her with anything notable.

Their break came when Malachi offered Gina back her smartwatch. The Bullocks were shocked, thinking the hospital had lost it, and Emily suggested they use the GPS to track down where Gina had gone after leaving the club. She, Rex, and Malachi were engrossed in this research, which gave Gina and Wren a chance to talk privately in the inn's bathroom.

Gina called what happened a "walkout." It was the third time she had teleported without meaning to, though it was by far the scariest: the furthest she'd gone before was about a hundred meters. Wren empathized with Gina, saying strange things happened to her too, and Gina asked how she could stand it. This didn't seem like something she could ever get over.

Malachi narrowed Gina's final moments in Alabama down to a circle about 6km across, in a rural area off the highway north of a town called Goodwater. However, it also proved Gina's movements were impossible: she was still in Alabama ten minutes before suddenly appearing in Vermont. Emily couldn't make sense of this, panicking, and Rex's references to A Wrinkle in Time and Quantum Leap were not as helpful as he thought.

Wren and Gina experienced a horrific vision of being absorbed back into the flesh of their "mother," the mountainous Great Old One in the primordial sea. They spent millions of years having their flesh assimilated, then spat out into new forms, then violently consumed again, over and over and over. When Wren came to be Wren once more, she was in a darkened room. There was a hospital bed there, but the girl lying in it wasn't Gina, but a deathly thin teenager. She asked Wren to come closer, refusing to answer questions with more than a beckon. But when Wren refused, something she couldn't see stabbed her deep. She realized, in a bout of dream logic, the girl was a parasite, and whatever implement had stabbed her was draining something from her that would keep the girl alive. She apologized the entire time she was killing Wren, and Wren tried to talk her down from it... and it actually worked. The draining slowed, then stopped, with just a little of Wren's strength remaining.

Then she was back in the bathroom. But Gina was nowhere to be found.

Wren slipped out of the building to search around it. She climbed onto the roof, a hunch based on one of Gina's previous walkouts. Finally, she tried to bring on one of her visions, and for the first time she found she could direct them. She saw Gina was back at Indian Rocks, rocking back and forth, screaming into her hands.

Wren and Malachi took off for the mountain. Rex's attempts to keep Emily calm failed, as if she'd never even seen an episode of Quantum Leap, but he did manage to force Emily to pull her rental car over while Malachi sped off. 

Up on the mountain, Wren and Malachi found Gina suffering an acute episode of depersonalization and led her back to the parking lot. Emily pulled up just as they arrived, demanding to take pictures of their FBI IDs.

 

After Emily left with Gina, the team contacted Agent MARCUS to warn him what Emily knew: he emphasized the need to keep the Bullocks quiet about everything. They also told him Indian Rocks needed to be destroyed to keep others from suffering visions of the Great Old Ones, which shocked MARCUS, but he expressed concern that the attention to such activity might expose more people. His response was ultimately noncommittal, but talking it through did help them realize Indian Rocks was a symptom of a bigger problem: the power that lay here was a relay for whatever had attacked Gina in Alabama.

With a nerve-wracking day coming to a close, Malachi went back home for the night. He owed it to his wife to tell her he'd be flying out again right with only a week until Christmas.

December 16

The team caught a flight to Birmingham out of Logan International Airport. Aaron brought Wren up to speed while they were in the air: the Facebook group was technically the online presence of a New Age bookstore called Bell & Shadow, but it had developed its own community beyond the store's regulars. Gina had posted in the group three months ago, asking about people's "real magical experiences." All three women had answered that post:

• Melissa Naylor disappeared on 11/17. Her supernatural experience was mundane, potentially an odd coincidence.
• Eileen Brown disappeared on 11/29. Her experience was unsettling and hard to explain.
• Danielle Smith disappeared on 12/5. Her experience was a barely-disguised sales pitch for her services as a psychic medium.

When they landed, all of them had voicemails waiting from their various bosses. Emily Bullock had been making lots of calls.

• Grant Grayson, Wren's supervisor at the FBI, had covered her ass with the Albany field office, who were complaining about catching the blame for her actions. Grayson trusted her to do good work, especially when told a potential human trafficking victim had been recovered safely, but he still wasn't happy about being shut out behind layers of security clearance he'd never even heard of: his last word to Wren was to close the case and fast.
• Heidi, the administrator of Rex's hospital, icily reminded him of the need to behave professionally and not draw inappropriate attention onto himself. What first sounded like chiding his egotism soon revealed itself to be anxiety: Rex's hospital did not operate totally above board, bodies had a habit of disappearing there, and Rex knew where all of them were metaphorically buried. If he went down, Heidi went down with him, and she needed him to do a better job staying out of sight.
• Dr. James Wan, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Department of Fish & Wildlife, contacted Malachi with some confused questions. Clearly out of touch with his staff, Dr. Wan wasn't entirely sure what Malachi did as a consultant for the FBI, but he ate up Malachi's story about human traffickers using the same routes as wildlife smugglers. He suggested a battery of HR seminars, lectures, training sessions, etc to make Malachi a public face of the organization: all activities that would take him away from fieldwork.

Once settled in their hotel, the team got changed. It was time for them to visit the Hunt. 

 

The Hunt was a windowless, nondescript building that didn't draw much attention to itself, besides the two bouncers outside frisking people for weapons. But once they got inside, they found a stylish, luxurious decor and a small crowd who comfortably chatted among each other and the staff. It was quiet on a Monday night, which initially made the Agents stand out... but they managed to fit in surprisingly quickly. Wren and Rex mingled with a young woman named Spider: Rex gave her an actual spider, telling her to keep it, which she loved, and Wren compared tattoos with her of their namesake animals. They didn't push for information, but a few more people joined the conversation, impressed with Rex's menagerie and establishing them as welcome faces. Before they left, Wren exchanged Instagram info with Spider.

Malachi did the same with co-owner Eddie Starr, who was tending bar himself that night while his husband Luther manned the DJ booth. Malachi said he and his friends were scientists in town for a conference on wildfire ecology. (There was a brief misunderstanding when Malachi said he was "with" Wren and Rex, which Eddie took to mean "throuple" rather than "coworkers.") The two made small talk, but despite Malachi's attempts to prove for information about Gina Bullock or the rural areas near Goodwater, Eddie didn't know anything.

December 17

The Agents slept through the morning after their late night at the Hunt, but by afternoon they were ready to check out Bell & Shadow. The store had uneven hardwood floors and smelled like a spicy candle inside. The shelves were laden with crystals and a new bestseller, "50 Ways Spirituality Can Help You Lose Weight!" along with Birmingham tourism knickknacks: this was not a place where true occult insight would be hiding. Yet the man behind the counter showed an interest in Wren, talking past Rex and Malachi to say he could sense The Gift within her. He sold her a blue apatite crystal (Wren noted Gina had mentioned meditating on one during her first walkout) and a copy of a chapbook called The Witch-Cult in Western Massachusetts, a present for Aaron. Malachi bought one too, then steered the conversation to  ask about ley lines southwest of Birmingham, or other places of power... and he got a bite. The clerk didn't know anything about that, but he offered to ask "Karen" about them, a customer who lived in the area. She'd been a regular but didn't come in much anymore. She was having trouble at home, though it wasn't his place to go into detail.

The Agents jumped on this information. Wren specifically asked if Karen was dealing with an illness in the family? A sick daughter, maybe? The man stammered, shocked and nervous and asked them all to leave. But before they did, Rex pointed something out to Wren: a bucket with a sign on it saying "Help Sidney Fight Cancer!" and a picture of a smiling teenage girl.

It was the same girl Wren had seen in the hospital bed.