Chasing Omega Read online




  CHASING OMEGA

  Ω

  Michael Prescott

  michaelprescott.net

  Chasing Omega, by Michael Prescott

  Copyright © 2013 Douglas Borton

  All rights reserved

  Smashwords edition

  Cover art by Reenie

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Afterword

  Also by Michael Prescott

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Omega program is imaginary, but all other references to parapsychological research are factual. Some citations are provided in the Afterword, and many more are found in my online bibliography.

  –Michael Prescott

  CHAPTER 1

  “Do you believe in life after death?”

  The question took me by surprise. It didn’t seem to track with anything we’d been talking about.

  “I don’t know,” I said, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. “Haven’t really thought about it.”

  She turned in the passenger seat and fixed me with a stare. “Everybody’s thought about it.”

  That was true, I supposed. And the fact was, I had thought about it–thought about it too much in the past two years. But I didn’t see why it was any business of hers.

  I’d picked her up twenty minutes earlier on a desolate desert highway midway between Tucson and the Mexican border. Unusual to see a woman hitching alone, and even more unusual when it was after 2:00 AM in the middle of nowhere. She looked scuffed up and careworn and haunted. She had no handbag, only a leather satchel that she gripped close to her chest. She was dressed in a sort of white pantsuit that didn’t flatter her, her skin was pale, and even her hair was white, or silver-gray anyhow. Prematurely so–she couldn’t have been more than forty. My age, for what that’s worth.

  The only thing I wasn’t sure about were her eyes. Green, maybe–or gray. In the chancy light, I couldn’t tell.

  Something about the way she’d materialized out of the moonlight appealed to me on a visceral level. From a distance she was almost more wraith than woman. Up close she was real enough. Her name, she said, was Claire–just Claire–and she was nervous. Throughout our ride she’d kept her head down while glancing slyly in the side-view mirror, trying to be inconspicuous as she scanned the road behind us.

  I’d kept the conversation going, talking about nothing in particular, as we sped west with the top down, the warm sandpapery wind scrubbing our faces. My car was a 1962 Rambler American with a long-ago rebuilt engine, and nothing about it was cherry except the color. I’d picked it up three years ago from a friend who had put a hundred thousand miles on the new engine, and since then I’d added nearly another hundred thousand myself. The damn thing still started up every time I turned the key, a fact that never stopped taking me by surprise.

  Our talk had been safely meaningless until she suddenly went all metaphysical on me. Which is where you came in when I started my little story, like Homer, in medias res.

  Yeah, that’s right. Latin. I have unexpected depths.

  She was still staring at me, waiting for a better answer.

  “All right,” I said, “if you want to know … I think it’s crap. When you’re gone, you’re gone. Lights out. Food for worms and beetles.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “The same way I know about Santa Claus, or those Nigerian princes who want to transfer a million dollars to my bank account. Anything that sounds too good to be true is a lie.”

  “That’s the answer a lot of people would give. But not all of them would be so angry about it.”

  Was I angry? I decided I was. “I don’t like people who give false hope. Who prey on weakness. Like those phony psychics who claim they can get your dear departed on the line–for a fee. It’s cruel and … and stupid. I don’t know which part bothers me more. Probably the stupidity. Cruelty I almost understand. Stupidity just pisses me off.”

  “I see.”

  She was quiet after that.

  I wondered why it mattered to her. It wasn’t a subject I wanted to pursue.

  But when I looked at her again, she was still watching me with that vaguely disappointed, vaguely challenging stare.

  “How about you?” I asked reluctantly. “Do you believe?”

  “No, I don’t believe. I know.”

  Terrific.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So I let the road speak for me with its endless low-octave hum.

  “You’re awfully quiet all of a sudden,” she said.

  “That afterlife stuff is kind of a conversation stopper. Why’d you bring it up?”

  “Because there’s a car following us. The people in the car are after me. And it all has to do with life after death.”

  Ω

  You’ve probably never been to Santa Cruz County, so let me set the scene for you. There’s a lot of open desert, with dun-colored mountains looming on most horizons. Saguaro cacti, the big ones with the spiky arms, thrive here, as do mesquite and palo verde trees. Crime is high, and gets worse as you approach the border. Towns are small and dusty and not burdened with an excess of high culture. People are mostly just scraping by. The population tilts toward ranchers and cowhands, and is decidedly low on hedge fund managers and arbitrageurs.

  The stretch of country we were passing through was one of many long barren corridors between towns. Horse ranches were scattered here and there, along with the occasional trailer park or housing development, but mostly there was a great deal of nothing–just a winding two-lane road, round-shouldered hills, and the memory of yesterday’s heat etched into the night air.

  The road was empty except for us. Or so I thought.

  “I don’t see any car,” I said.

  “Look harder. Their lights are off, and they’re keeping well back.”

  I squinted at the rearview mirror, not believing it. I’d almost given up looking when I glimpsed a faint wavering luminescence, like a will-o’-the-wisp. The lights were off, as she’d said, but there was a faint interior glow, as if someone was using a phone or a computer. Someone on the passenger side, I thought–which meant two people in the car.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You see them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I’m not paranoid.” She sounded altogether too pleased about it. Not a good sign. In my experience, perfectly sane people don’t take much pride in being proved perfectly sane.

  “I guess not. You’re just a mystery woman who’s being tracked through the desert in the middle of the night. So who are they?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I only know where they’re from.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Then take Thoreau’s advice. Simplify, simplify.”

  She wiped threads of hair from her eyes. “All right. I’m one of those phony psychics you were ranting about. Except the preferred term is medium, because that’s what I am–a medium between the living and the dead.”

  “You mean you run a strip-mall tarot card parlor? Madam Zola’s House
of Froot Loops?”

  “I work out of my home in Litchfield, Connecticut. I don’t read tarot cards. And I don’t call myself Madam Zola.”

  “Whatever. Just tell your story, and leave out the boring parts.”

  “I was part of an experiment,” she said.

  Once she started talking, she got into a rhythm pretty quick. She spoke fluently, the wind catching at her words as they tumbled out in a rush. The story she told was crazy, but it did hold my interest. If she was a liar, at least she was an inventive one.

  It seemed she’d been contacted by some people who wanted to study mediumship. They offered to fly her to Phoenix and limo her to a research lab in the desert, where she would spend two weeks as a psychic guinea pig. No remuneration, but she would get a free trip and the chance to prove herself.

  She hadn’t expected much. The experiments were being conducted in Silver Creek–which, she’d learned from Wikipedia, was a ghost town. This struck me as appropriate, but I made no comment. She had assumed her accommodations would be a ratty motel room, or maybe a pup tent. The whole thing sounded like an adventure. She was prepared to rough it, though I got the impression she hadn’t done much roughing it in her life.

  But the limo drove right through Silver Creek’s ramshackle downtown without stopping. The facility, it turned out, lay in the flat, scorched desert, just beyond Quarry Road, which led to an abandoned silver mine.

  “I know that area,” I said. “You’re talking about the Ridgeview Institute.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “A mental hospital,” I said carefully. “Its full name is the Ridgeview Institute of Psychology. RIP, for short.”

  “Unfortunate acronym.”

  “An even more unfortunate locale, don’t you think? I mean, given that you presumably want me to think of you as sane.”

  “The institute does treat mental illness, but they’re conducting this research along completely separate lines. Many parapsychologists were trained as regular psychologists, you know.”

  “Still … you’re admitting you were in the nut house.”

  “That’s hardly the way I would put it.”

  “It’s how most people would put it.”

  “Mr. Brand. If I really had been confined to a psychiatric hospital, would I have brought up the Ridgeview Institute at all?”

  “You might, if you thought I’d recognized your outfit as institute clothes. That white jumpsuit deal–it’s what the patients wear, isn’t it?”

  “How would you happen to know that?”

  “I’m a veritable cornucopia of trivial and useless facts.”

  “If you recognized the outfit, why did you pick me up?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I should think it’s generally inadvisable to offer a ride to wandering mental patients.”

  “Maybe I was in a charitable mood.”

  “Is that the reason?”

  “It’ll do, for now.”

  Her green–or gray?–eyes narrowed. “I’m not altogether certain I trust you, Mr. Brand.”

  “I’m not altogether certain you have any choice. So what happened to you at the loony bin?”

  She frowned at the way I’d phrased it, but swallowed her annoyance. “Have you ever been inside Ridgeview?”

  “Nope.”

  “Even if you had, you wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual. The two floors above ground are like any other treatment facility. The basement, however, is a different story. It’s much more than a bare-bones operation. These people have expensive equipment, state-of-the-art labs, and accommodations suitable for a luxury hotel.”

  “The basement is where they carried out their experiments with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Experiments that involved talking to ghosts.”

  “I know how implausible it sounds.”

  “Nah, not at all. Happens every day.”

  “When I saw what kind of setup they had, I began to realize something was up. Nobody in parapsychology has this kind of money. Nobody in parapsychology has any money. Only the government could fund Omega.”

  “Omega?”

  “That’s what they called it. The Omega program.” She glanced over her shoulder. “They’re gaining on us.”

  “I know. So you’re saying the government is behind all this? And they’re after you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know what their intentions are. I have a theory about it, but–but it doesn’t matter right now. What matters is what they did to me.”

  “Which is?”

  “They shut down my abilities. They took away my gift.”

  She pronounced the words with dramatic emphasis. I let them hang in space for a second or two.

  “And just how did they do that?” I asked slowly.

  “There was this thing. They called it the AR visor. AR–for Alternate Reality. It’s like a pair of goggles with earphones and a skullcap. You put it on and it–it does things.”

  “I’m guessing it doesn’t sing ‘Melancholy Baby.’”

  “It puts you into an altered state of consciousness. Something about temporal lobe stimulation. I’m not a scientist. I don’t know the details.” She took a breath. “They asked me to wear it. And stupidly, because I didn’t know any better, I said yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “No–it wasn’t okay. I don’t even want to–I can’t–can’t talk about that part of it. It felt like my brain was shorting out. I was screaming. I lost consciousness. It was horrible.” She looked over her shoulder again. “They’re getting even closer.”

  “I noticed. Hold on.”

  I accelerated, increasing our distance from the chase car.

  We were coming into a slightly more developed area. Not a town, but a collection of odds and ends indicative of human habitation. To my left, a scrap yard blurred past behind a chicken-wire fence. A guard dog coughed a throaty bark. I knew that dog. He was an arthritic German shepherd, name of Hans, and he bared his fangs whenever he saw me.

  A feed store for the local ranchers came next, and a combination liquor store and saloon. Everything was closed now, even the bar.

  “So you blacked out …” I prompted.

  “And woke up in the infirmary. And I didn’t have my gift anymore.”

  “How’d you know? Did you try direct-dialing the Elysian Fields?”

  “I just knew. Something was gone. There was–a void.”

  She was quiet then, too quiet. Thinking about it, reliving it.

  “Infirmary,” I prompted.

  “Yes. Right. And no one would tell me what was going on. Everyone was being evasive. I was alone in there, the only patient. They wouldn’t let me make a phone call or go online. And they wouldn’t let me leave.”

  “You were a prisoner.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “And you were scared.”

  She flashed a glare at me. “I was angry. I don’t like being victimized.”

  “Okay. So how’d you get out?”

  “I had one friend, an orderly named Phil. He offered to help me escape.”

  Phil told her that one of the night-shift technicians always left his jacket hanging on his office door, with a passkey inside. He wouldn’t notice that the passkey was missing until the end of his shift at 6:00 AM.

  “Phil said there was a rear exit on the ground floor. It was a loading dock. It wouldn’t be used at night, wouldn’t even be guarded. With the passkey I could get out that way.”

  “This Phil sounds like a very helpful fellow.”

  She caught my skepticism. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “It’s been my experience that people don’t go out of their way to help strangers unless there’s something in it for them.”

  “You picked me up. I’m a stranger.”

  “Maybe I’m the exception to the rule.” Or maybe I wasn’t. But I didn’t want to get into that. “So t
onight your friend Phil got you the passkey?”

  She nodded. “He led me upstairs to the loading dock. Told me that once I was outside, I should follow the access road straight to the main highway.”

  “But you never got to the main highway.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I’m psychic.” I shrugged. “Little joke.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “The main highway is south of Silver Creek. If you’d reached it, I wouldn’t have come across you on a back road that runs to the north.”

  “You’re right. I couldn’t take the access road as planned. A truck was coming. Apparently somebody was using the loading dock, after all.”

  She’d panicked, blundered into the brush, and started to run. By the time she stopped, she was lost.

  “You couldn’t navigate by the stars?” I asked.

  “I grew up in Hartford, where you can’t even see the stars. I wandered until I came to a trail. Maybe a deer path or something.”

  She’d followed it to a road, then made her way along the shoulder, hiding from the first few cars that passed. Eventually she’d realized she would have to risk hitchhiking. If she was still out in the open when the summer sun came up, she wouldn’t last long.

  “And then I came along,” I said. “Your knight in shining armor.”

  “I guess you could put it like that. Anyway, that’s my story. What’s the verdict?”

  “The jury is still out. And our friends are closing in again. I think maybe they’re about to make their move.”

  For the past few miles, the driver behind us had been creeping steadily closer, gaining on us even when we picked up speed. Once or twice he’d seemed to think about pulling into the opposite lane and trying to speed up alongside us, though he hadn’t gotten up the nerve.

  I didn’t want him to try it. Until now he’d kept pretty far back–far enough that he probably hadn’t gotten a good look at me or my passenger. He might not even be certain I had a passenger. I intended to keep it that way.