Jack was confused when he woke up. Really confused. He’d been confused before, like when he got to the analogy section of his college entrance exams and couldn’t figure out how “dispatch” might relate to “sluggishness”. This was worse. If anything, he was roughly as confused as the time his roommate gave him a funny mushroom, and he spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how walls worked.
The most confusing part was that he was still alive.
His whole body hurt, and it felt like someone was trying to pull his arms out of their sockets. Worse, the room around him didn’t make a lick of sense. The walls were in the wrong place and made of green webs. There was something oddly like a door nearby, but it was attached to the ceiling. Everything was completely wrong in ways he couldn’t understand.
Jack wanted to throw up, but the empty pit in his stomach told him it’d be uneventful.
He couldn’t move. Cold metal shackles had every part of his body pinned, and struggling against them was useless. He didn’t bother to call for help, since something terrible might respond.
So he lay there, breathing and aching, waiting for whatever the hell would happen next. Time melted away without any way to measure its passage. He might have lain there for hours, days or weeks for all he knew. It was all the same. A single, unending moment, punctuated only by the procession of mangled memories, and the short fits of sleep that interrupted them.
He thought back over the strange journey that brought him to that room. He remembered the life he used to have, all of the weird and wonderful places he’d seen, and the grateful faces he’d helped along the way.
That life existed once upon a time in a storybook that had since been burnt to ash and scattered to the wind. His life was gone, replaced by a world he hardly recognized. A world that had been crushed, eviscerated and torn limb from limb. In its smouldering remains, Jack had changed as well. He became someone different. Someone harder, who killed efficiently and without remorse, over and over until it became clear the killing could never sate him. It would never heal the wound, or quiet his mourning for the lifetime left behind.
Of this new life, which had hit a dead-end in some screwy alien prison, Jack knew only one thing: whatever changes might come would be for the worse. And after an eternity alone with his thoughts, Jack’s prediction came true.
The strange door in the ceiling opened like denim unraveling, revealing a blinding light behind it. Three silhouettes walked through the portal, and continued down the opposite wall. Jack stared at the visual puzzle for a few seconds, until his head straightened out and he figured it out. He’d been hanging from the ceiling all this time, and his captors were on the floor beneath him.
Two rhinos stood with their massive autocannons at the ready, on either side of a new kind of alien. This species was much more human-like, but in gangly, funhouse mirror proportions. He wore a form fitting uniform that covered him from head to toe, made from some slick material in midnight-blue and slate grey. The double-breasted jacket reminded Jack of fascist armies, and the leathery mask looked like something from a kinky sex shop. A white crescent crossed one eye.
The fascist alien’s movements were pin-point specific, and fluid without excess. He stepped to the center of the room and stopped beneath Jack, then looked up at the prisoner and carefully examined him. Apparently satisfied, he raised his right arm and tapped commands into some kind of wrist computer.
He looked back up at Jack and began to speak. The sounds were familiar, and Jack realized the alien was speaking a human language. It was a form of Arabic, one of many languages that Jack hardly spoke a word of.
“I don’t speak Arabic, asshole.”
The alien looked back to his computer and entered some more commands. Jack couldn’t see the display very well, but he caught streams of text flying by in a rainbow of colors.
“Subject language identification English. Understand does you thing I say?”
“Yeah, sure. Fuck off, ya sack of shit. You understand that?”
“Dialect North American. Variety Midwestern?” The alien’s sentence structure left much to be desired, but his accent was good and improving with every word. He had only a hint of something awkward in his pacing, like an autistic child.
“Pacific States Alliance,” Jack said.
“Thanking you.” He tapped some information into his computer, and then turned his full attention back to Jack. “Now we is capable to understand each’s other. I to fabricate questions, and you are making answer.”
“And if I don’t feel much like making answer?”
The response was one word. “Pain.”
The alien’s sharp eyes studied Jack intently, analyzing every movement, twitch, and wayward glance. He felt like he was being vivisected.
“You is understanding? Good. We commence questions. What name is?”
“Go to fucking hell.”
The alien shook his head, then removed a short baton from his belt. He made sure Jack got a good look at the weapon, then he thrust it into Jack’s armpit quick as a cobra strike. Jack’s whole side exploded in strobing, lightning flashes of pain that streaked out across his chest and arm.
Jack gritted his teeth and grunted. His whole face twisted into a knot.
“I was studied species acutely, and I having found many fifty productive nerve intersections. It is introduction. Pain will to increase during resistance continuing. You is understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I repeating, what name is?”
“Pretty sure I told you to go to hell.”
The baton struck in the exact same spot, but the pain was worse. It was an unstoppable flood, and his arm spasmed. When it finally subsided, Jack was struck by a memory of his karate teacher showing the kids a couple pressure points, talking about how effective they could be when used properly.
“You is challenge. Is soldier yes? Screaming not, but will to scream soon. I to begin new nerve package, and true pain then.”
Jack was drooling, but he couldn’t do a thing about it.
“Name unimportant, Nefrem. Reveal location is battle fleet.”
Jack’s chest was twitching, and he was having trouble speaking. “I don’t… don’t think that… made it through the translator.”
“Where location battle fleet is!? Nefrem fleet must to return. When is return?”
“What are you talking about?”
The alien reached up and grabbed Jack’s throat. “When?” it demanded.
“I don’t understand,” he gurgled.
A deep, throaty growl came out of the alien, and his grip on Jack’s throat tightened. “When?” the alien kept saying over and over again, until Jack slipped back into darkness, where more twisted dreams awaited him.
Chapter 39:
Interrogation
Jack’s life took on a peculiar sort of rhythm. They left him alone in his cell to stew for long stretches, until such time as the fascist alien bastard came back to question and torture him some more. During each questioning session, he was pushed up to and past his threshold for pain. He would pass out and find a small measure of peace, only to awaken later and repeat the process all over again.
Jack felt like Prometheus chained to his rock.
His resolve only lasted so long, and he started to answer questions, mingling truth and lies, losing track of where one began and the other ended. Sometimes, he made a game of giving the most ridiculous answers possible, speaking at length about an army called the Lost Boys who had a base hidden in Never Never Land, or the terrorist leader Christopher Robin and the suicide missions he launched from the 100 Acre Wood. When he ran out of kids’ books, he turned to movies, spinning stories about British super spies, flying Chinese monks, and space police with lenses attached to their hands.
The interrogator listened intently but never bought a word of it, and Jack discovered that the quality of his
