"committed" By A.r. Kirby -- Episode 23: "on The Road Again'

COMMITTED by A.R. Kirby

Episode 23 On the road again

H

ow much longer do you think we’ll have to wait?”

Brandon posed this question to Vernon and Ralph as he stood by a window in a comfortable waiting room at the Collective’s regional headquarters near Atlanta. It was a nice view, overlooking Stone Mountain Park. The headquarters, in fact, was hidden inside the massive hunk of granite that gave the park its name, and Brandon’s vantage point was from behind the massive carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson that adorned the face of the mountain. More specifically, he was looking at the park from inside Stonewall Jackson’s right eye. “No telling,” Vernon replied, not looking up from the People magazine he was reading. Ralph sat silently nearby. “You know how the Collective works -- ‘hurry up and wait’. It’s a lot like the military in that respect. Or maybe even Microsoft. Things will happen when they are supposed to happen.” “Feh,” Brandon huffed, and looked back out the window. They had certainly been hurrying for the past day. Following their meeting with Ralph in Canyon de Chelly, the three men drove back to Flagstaff where they caught a commercial flight to Los Angeles on Friday night. After that, they caught some shut-eye at the Collective’s west coast facility before taking a Megasonic Stealth Transport across country early Saturday morning. After some

Committed by A.R. Kirby superficial greetings in Atlanta, the three men were shepherded into this room, where they awaited the arrival of one Autumn Delaine, Senior Associate for Equipment and Supplies for Southeastern North America. It had been half an hour or so, and still there was no sign of Delaine. Brandon fidgeted, Vernon read, and Ralph sat still as a stone. Eventually, the door to the waiting room slid open with a hiss, and an attractive woman, somewhere in her mid-thirties, Brandon guessed, walked into the room. Her brunette hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, and she was dressed in the standard Collective duty outfit of black slacks and black turtleneck, but she wore it better than any Associate Brandon had ever seen. “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said as Vernon and Ralph stood from their seats. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Welcome to Atlanta. I’m Associate Delaine, and I’ll be equipping you for your mission. Please follow me.” With that, she turned and headed out of the room, with Vernon and Ralph behind. They entered a long hallway, carved from the granite of the mountain itself, but highly polished and smooth. Brandon hurried to catch up as Delaine led the trio down the hall rapidly. She stopped at the end of the hall in front of an elevator, then turned and opened a door into a stairwell. “Sorry guys,” she said, “but we’re walking down for now. Some local seismologists are doing some testing on the top of the mountain, so use of the elevators has been suspended while they are here. We don’t want to give them any reason to be looking around.” “Such is the life of a super-secret organization,” Vernon mumbled to Brandon, as they started walking down the steps.

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Episode 22 After what seemed like thousands of stairs (Brandon wasn’t sure how far they had walked; he’d stopped counting after forty or so flights), Delaine finally stopped and opened a door off a landing. Inside, the room opened into a gigantic cavern, as large as a football field, but as polished and glistening as the hallway they had walked down earlier. Some hundred feet above them, hidden lights in the ceiling cast a bright, even glow throughout the room. A variety of vehicles -- from Volkswagen Beetles to tractor-trailer trucks and even a few tanks and some odd-looking contraptions Brandon couldn’t identify -- were lined in formation against one of the walls. Several service bays nearby were abuzz with activity, with Collective Associates working diligently to repair or maintain the organization’s varied means of transport. Delaine walked the trio away from the vehicles to a fenced-off area on the other side of the cavern. They reached a gate in the fence, and the Senior Associate placed her right palm against a reader beside the opening. “Good Morning, Associate Delaine,” said a computerized voice as the gate swung open in recognition of her hand print. “Please help yourself to whatever supplies you need.” “Welcome, gentlemen, to our supply house and armory,” she said proudly as she ushered the three men inside the gate, which then closed silently behind them. “Where we keep all the goodies,” Vernon whispered to Brandon. “I absolutely hate this place.” Brandon, on the other hand, was amazed. Row after row of high shelves contained almost every piece of equipment a Collective field agent could possibly need. One section contained clothing for various climates. Another featured surveillance and spy gear. There was a section for conventional weapons with everything from .22 caliber pistols to massive pieces of artillery. And there was so very, very much more. The rows of shelves seemed endless, and Brandon either didn’t recognize or couldn’t 3

Committed by A.R. Kirby describe much of what he saw. “Wow,” was all he could say, his eyes moving from one piece of equipment to another. Delaine smiled. It always pleased her to see new Associates gawking in amazement at her collection of goods. “Sure is a lot of stuff,” Ralph said quietly in his deep, gruff monotone. “Seems like a waste.” “Waste? Never,” Delaine said, slightly defensive. “All of this equipment is vital to the operations of the Collective. Our work takes us to so many places and so many extremes that we have to be prepared for any contingency. My job is to make sure that we have the right tools available at a moment’s notice for those contingencies.” “Oh yeah?” Brandon took a small silver box about the size of a cigarette pack from the shelf he was standing next to. “So what contingency does this meet?” he asked as the fumbled with the box, accidentally triggering the mechanism. A weighted net sprang from the end of the box and draped itself over Ralph. “Give me that,” Delaine said hastily as she took the box from Brandon’s hand and Ralph tried to disentangle himself. “Don’t touch anything else, okay?” Brandon stared sheepishly at the floor. “Yes ma’am,” he said quietly. “Take it easy on the kid,” Vernon said. “He’s new. And he just demonstrated why I don’t like all this fancy-dancy stuff. You can’t always trust a machine to do what it is supposed to do when you want it to do it.” “Maybe not,” Delaine said, taking the net from the newlyfreed Ralph and replacing it on the shelf with its container, “but we 4

Episode 22 do our best to make sure all our Associates are equipped with what they need to get the job done, and that it works as it is supposed to work. And that is exactly what I intend to do. I’ve got my orders. I’m to provide you with transportation and standard field equipment for your operation, and you will receive it whether you like it or not.” Vernon rolled his eyes. “Do what you must,” he said, as the equipment officer led the men to a table alongside the fence. An ordinary-looking daypack sat on one end of the table, and a wide range of gadgets and doohickeys was laid out neatly alongside it. “Okay, gentlemen, I’ve got your standard field Associate package ready to go,” she said, glowing at the shiny array of weaponry and apparatus spread out before her. “First...” “First, we’ve got to get moving,” Vernon said, interrupting Delaine as he stepped to the table, stuffing the equipment haphazardly into the pack. “It’s a standard field kit. I know what it is, Junior knows what it is, and Ralph doesn’t care what it is. We probably won’t even use any of it. Well, I might use the lighter if I buy a cigar.” He zipped up the pack and threw it to an astonished Brandon. “Here, Junior, take care of this.” Delaine stammered for a moment, then regained her composure slightly. “All right, then, Senior Associate Hasselblad,” she said curtly. “Let’s move on to your vehicle.” She led the men out of the storage area without saying a word. They crossed the cavern to the line of vehicles against the wall. Brandon’s eyes widened at the variety of transport available to them. “Hey, let’s take this one,” he said, gazing longingly at a low-slung, fire-red Ferrari. “You like that one, huh?” Delaine stood behind Brandon, 5

Committed by A.R. Kirby gazing at the car from over his shoulder. “It’s my favorite, too. Goes from zero to 150 in less than four seconds, and it’s fitted with all the standard equipment, plus a few other special items, like heat-seeking missiles and limited flight capability.” “But it only seats two people,” Vernon scoffed. “And I don’t think Ralph could even fit into it. No, this one will suit us just fine.” Brandon looked over to where Vernon stood. Parked in front of him was a nondescript Ford Taurus sedan, tan in color, and as lacking in excitement as the Ferrari was packed with lethal purpose. “You’re kidding, right?” Brandon asked as he ambled over to the car. “Nope, not at all. It’s got everything we need. Good American craftsmanship, plenty of legroom for Ralph, we can all fit into it, and it will keep us under the radar. It’s not like the three of us aren’t conspicuous enough as it is.” Brandon had to agree with this last point. During their trip from Flagstaff to Los Angeles, the three men received more than their fair share of stares from curious onlookers. The grizzled old man, the seven-foot Indian, and the African-American hacker made quite the trio when they were in public together. Brandon sighed and stowed the pack in the back seat of the car. “Ralph’s got shotgun, right?” “Very nice of you,” Ralph said, getting in the passenger door. “Vernon, you ready?” “Yeah,” Vernon said as he took the keys from Delaine and got behind the steering wheel. He closed the door and rolled down the driver’s window. 6

Episode 22 “Thanks, Associate,” he said, cranking the Ford. “We’ll be back sometime this week!” With that, Vernon pulled the car out of formation and headed for the secret exit that would lead the three men out of the Collective facility and into the real world. It wasn’t long before the men were driving along Interstate 20 through Atlanta, Vernon concentrating on maneuvering through the Atlanta traffic, Ralph gazing at the gleaming skyscrapers, and Brandon sulking in the back seat, wishing he were slinging the Ferrari down the highway with the beautiful Associate Delaine sitting beside him. Vernon’s voice broke him from his reverie. “So, kid, where are we headed?” “Good question,” Brandon answered. “We know that the dimensional transfer took place somewhere in the southeast, but that’s about it.” Vernon huffed. “Okay, Mays, take out your PDA and call up the Collective database. See if there’s been any updates.” Brandon pulled out his palmtop computer and quickly connected to Collective headquarters. A few seconds later, he had the file dealing with the anomaly. “Eh. There’s not much. The signal origination has been narrowed down some, but not much. It looks like we’ve got an area bounded by Meridian, Mississippi on the west, Nashville on the north, Augusta, Georgia on the east, and Tallahassee, Florida on the south. That leaves a whole lot of territory to cover.” “And we don’t have a whole lot of time to cover it,” Vernon said, his attention still on the road ahead. “Tell you what -- try a Google search for any odd news coming out of the region. UFO sightings, cattle mutilations, that sort of thing, anything 7

Committed by A.R. Kirby weird that happened around the time of the disruption. Might give us a starting point.” The car was quiet for a few minutes as Brandon worked with his PDA. “There’s not a lot,” he said, reading the search results on the small screen in his hand. “A woman apparently disappeared without a trace in Americus, Georgia on Thursday night. And there’s a story about a three-headed calf being born in Sycamore, Tennessee, outside of Nashville.” Ralph suddenly sat up with a start. “Let’s go to Nashville,” he said. “Why’s that?” Vernon looked at his old friend. “Some kind of Native American intuition?” “Nah, I just love country music,” Ralph replied. “And I want to see the Hermitage -- where Andrew Jackson lived. He told me it was a nice place.” “Who told you it was a nice place?” Brandon asked. “Andrew Jackson.” “Pfft,” Brandon hissed with disbelief. “Andrew Jackson. Right. Dead president, the man on the twenty-dollar bill. When did he tell you that? In the cave during one of your vision quests?” Ralph turned in his seat so he faced the younger Associate. “No, as a matter of fact, he told me sometime around -- when was it? -- sometime around 1829 or so. I was a pretty well-known mystic among all the tribes back then, and the Cherokees asked me to go with them to Washington to meet with the President to discuss their grievances. So we went, and we sat down with him to talk. Turned out that Jackson was pretty much a dick. He never did 8

Episode 22 get around to talking about what problems we had. He just went on and on about Tennessee and what a great place it was and what a nice house he had there. Dealing with him was one of the reasons I went back into Spider Rock.” “Really.” Brandon was skeptical. “Really,” Ralph said, turning back in his seat. “So just how old are you?” “Better brace yourself for this one, kid,” Vernon chimed in, looking at his young charge in the rearview mirror. “It’s a doozy.” “Don’t rightly know, exactly,” Ralph replied, a smile on his face. “Real old. Quit counting a very long time ago. My best guess is maybe a couple thousand years.” Brandon sank back in his seat, speechless. To be continued...

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