CONSPIRACY

CONSPIRACY

A SHORT STORY BY CHARLES E.J. MOULTON


“Come on, man,” Oliver said. “They’re coming closer.”
Roger swung his head back toward his friend and gritted his teeth. The crazy look in his eyes was way worse than the drool dripping from the sides of his mouth.
“I know they’re behind us.”
Oliver cocked his head and sneered. Roger and he were escaping, for crying out loud. It had been Roger’s idea. Now, that guy acted as if Oliver was the enemy.
He took a step back and let Roger push the iron bars a bit.
They made a squeaking sound.
“We are so close, you know that. I just can’t get this thing off the sockets.”
He pushed harder.
“Why don’t you try dynamite?”
Oliver began chuckling.
Roger swung over, his ripped shirt swinging off the side of his arm.
“Are you going to help me or not?”
Oliver gave Roger an up-nod, an arrogant, silly up-nod.
“What do I get for this? Arrogant remarks?”
Roger’s eyes opened wide. So wide that his entire irises were visible. The rage was so vicious, that his hands began shaking. Roger’s head shook and his mouth began to froth.
“I want out!”
“You want in or I will kill you! Honest to God, I will rip your heart out!”
Oliver fear arose from the pits of his bowel and ended up appearing in his own eyes like a bell. Roger ran up to Oliver, grabbed him by his T-shirt and pushed him against the wall.
Oliver felt the soot and the dust and the paint crumbling onto his hair.
Oliver gave out a shriek.
“Man,” Roger spat. “You know what is out there? The C.I.A. is out there. The Illuminati. They will use us to fish bait. They will turn us into toast.”
His arm swung back toward the bars that covered the window. He hit the bars with his entire body. Now, Roger’s arm was bloody.
“See what you made me do?”
Roger was still looking at Oliver.
“We have sneaked down to this cellar every day, planning this thing.”
He grabbed Oliver harder now, blood dripping upon Oliver’s white shirt.
He lift him off the ground.
Oliver shrieked even louder now, shivering.
“Please, Rog, let me go,” he cried. Oliver closed his eyes, hoping that this pain would end. The pain in his stomach began to grow.
Roger let Oliver down. Very slowly, his feet reached the ground.
His strength baffled Oliver. It scared him, as well, that this man that he thought he knew so well attacked him so. Concentrated stamina reached his soul. Roger made Oliver feel like he was in an elevator.
Oliver’s breath shallow, he felt like letting everything go and just running. But the bloody guards thought they were crazy, anyway. I mean, officially, they were. But they knew better, didn’t they? Better.
Oliver got his tic back. The one that made his eye twitch.
Roger set Oliver down and slammed him against the wall, snorting, sounding like a bloody bull. As Roger went back to his work by the window, Oliver stood there alone, twitching, fumbling with his fingernails.
“How far are you, Roger? I am getting restless, man.”
“I am almost ready. Almost there. Just shut your face.”
Oliver crouched together, his hands clutching his stomach. The cough shook in his lungs, tickled his vocal chords and exploded up through his nostrils. A cascade of vomit came through his mouth. The cough made it worse. “One day, blood will join the pea soup.”
Roger stopped working and looked over.
“Please don’t fall apart on me now, Oliver,” Roger cried out. “You know how bloody close we are to this. Just hold it together, man. Please.”
For a moment, Oliver felt like a naughty child standing behind his father, watching him work and sweat and turn red with anguish before finally blowing into smithereens.
The tears came through Oliver’s closed eyes, all energy leaving him.
“I’m going back, Rog,” Oliver said. “I can’t do this anymore. I got to go, man.”
Roger looked up, seeing his friend slowly stand up, gathering strength, sighing and trying to get enough power to move. A pool of old food rested on the floor close to the sewage cover man hole. Roger winced.
“Yuck,” he said, sighing. Roger shook his head, knowing he had to speak to the guy. “Control yourself, kid. Goddamn it, boy, control yourself.”
Oliver began walking back, seeing himself in that safe room watching TV and eating toast, playing chess and drinking cocoa.
Roger shot up like a rocket and all that Oliver heard were the shuffles. It was too late to react before Roger grabbed Oliver’s shirt and turned him around. Once that had happened, Oliver felt the rush of wind against his own face. It felt like a crazy man’s wind, a wind that in every way spoke of a psychosis.
“My God, man,” Roger whispered under his breath.
Oliver had never heard anyone whisper with such anger that it sounded like scream. The anger was scary. Of course, he wanted to leave. No shit. But this way? No. Oliver wiped the vomit off his pants and the drool off his chin. Leaning over and breathing heavily, Oliver’s knees gave way and he fell to the dirty floor, ridden with spiders and old, dried-up washing detergent, half-empty dustbins and three year old medicine packages.
Oliver kneeled down on the floor, shivered, embraced his knees and seemed to ask himself if there was a way out. Roger scared him. Gee wiz, how this crazy old man scared him to tears. But they had both witnessed the UFO, they had spoken to the alien and, by God, they had heard these government officials speaking of the conspiracy.
Oliver thought of the novel he had read in school.
The one sentence that rang in his mind was: “All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Well, this government officials that they had overheard speaking about a global clean-up were, in their own mind, more equal than others.
When Oliver kneeled down, Roger kneeled down with him.
“Ollie,” he continued, softer this time. Obviously, he really tried to keep his cool, caressing the young boy’s arm. “I know it seems safe up there. But they want us to shut up. Officially, we are just loonies. But we know too much to be loonies. They know that. We can’t give up. Not now.”
Oliver had given up. It was safer up there, agents and aliens or not. It felt good, knowing that these guys were going to take care of him. It felt good.
“I don’t want any more pain, Roger,” Oliver cried, his eyes bloodshot and wet.
“Aliens are up there with invisible cameras,” Roger spat. “This is Area 51, bozo. They have kept us here, because we know too much. You know what we have seen. You know that starship with the blinking lights and the tiny creature that was able to appear out of nowhere and disappear. Soon, we will have the Illuminati and the FEMA running the country. And it won’t be pretty. Didn’t you hear him speaking, that little guy?”
“I heard him,” Oliver whined. Oliver now shot up, taking his turn to be the hyperactive nutcase. He stood up, feeling as if ejected from a catapult. Then he almost slipped on his own vomit, felt his heart race, saw himself in his own mind slipping and falling and dying and being ejected from his own body and transported to the eons. But Oliver caught himself at the last minute, grabbing a strong hold of an iron pipe that seemed to be a gas connection. It bent a little, but remained strongly built into the wall.
“Shit, boy,” Roger shouted, “what was that?”
Oliver looked out the window, petrified.
“I thought I heard something,” he said. “Steps. I dunno what.”
The young man’s breath began resembling the rhythm of the Peter Gunn Theme. It felt as if he had been hit by a shovel. Tears, silent tears, came streaming down his face. This was too much. How had he managed to end up here? Him, a cute little freckle-faced kid from New Jersey that just loved soccer and wanted to open his own burger joint. Shit, man. How?
Roger, now serene, walked up and laid his hand on Oliver’s shoulder.
“There’s no one there.”
“Roger, I gotta decide. Either we get out now or I will stay in here forever. Schylla or Charybdis. Yin or Yang, man. I have to decide.”
“Easy, boy.”
Oliver’s bowels began moving. For a moment, the older Roger thought the kid would barf again and stepped back. But then he realized that Oliver was laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
Oliver couldn’t believe the choice of words that was used on him.
“What am I, a horse? Easy, boy? Those are the kinds of word you use on stallions, man. I am a person, not a goat!”
Roger nodded. “Okay. Just tell me what the alien said. Let’s just go through that once, okay?”
“Let me go.”
“No, Oliver. We are in this together.”
Now it was Oliver’s turn to get pissed off. He faced Roger and gave him a look that seemed so mad, so crazy that Roger took a step back, a very large step.
“I’ll tell you what he said,” Oliver screamed. “I told you, you can’t escape me. So, don’t even try. I will be in your mind forever. Well, shoot, I’m proving him wrong.”
Oliver broke free, his arm clashing out and hitting Roger.
The arm that swung around was, by chance, so strong and so precise as never before. Oliver’s hand hit his counterpart’s chin and the man fell down, hitting his head on a bucket. The bucket, filled with water, spilled on Roger’s head. Roger’s mouth blubbered, his tongue lolling. Blood oozed out from the skull and the man shook like a diabetic during an attack. After that, the guy was gone. Gone. Gone. Totally gone.
Oliver let out a high pitched scream that sound more like a little girl’s scream than a 35 year old man’s scream. Dumbfounded, he froze, looking at that blood slowly run down toward the manhole. Out of panic, Oliver ran out of the back room with the small trap door. He had been standing there in his freaky pyjamas freezing his ass of for the past hour, hoping Roger’s thick hands could break the lock. Now, he ran up and down the hallway, hoping that the damn guards would come and take him back. Still, he wanted to leave at the same time.
“Oh, darn. Oh, shit.”
Oliver had killed the asshole. Realizing that no one was coming and that no one actually had discovered them, yet, he ran back into the room with the trap door up to the outer court yard. The blood now tricked from Roger’s big head all the way to manhole that offered a peek into the catacombs of the depth.
Oliver took a look at the strangely familiar man laying there. What was going to do now? Split? Leave this guy laying here? Just leave? He couldn’t.
“Oh, Rog, why did I meet you in the first place,” Oliver spat to himself. “I didn’t know you. And why did those government officials see us seeing that thing?”
Oliver wept like a sissy, nibbling on his fingernails, twitching with his eyes, breathing in a presto faster than a commercial for a soft drink.
Oliver kneeled down and began to shake Roger.
“Come on, man,” Oliver said. “Wake up. Let’s go. Or stay. Or something. We can’t stay here. We can’t ... Wake up.”
Oliver trembled, his entire body twitching, breaking out into fits of sweat.
Panic spread across Oliver countenance like a virus. Why had he listened to Roger? They treated them well here, conspiracy or not. Of course, they kept them locked up. They had definately seen too much. Those damn aliens had just appeared out of nowhere, that kind of stuff really is reserved for the secret police, not for little ordinary guys like them. Those little guys with their rainbow caps.
“Oliver? Roger? Where are you guys hiding?”
The guards. Those were the voices of the guards, muffled by the cavelike tunnels down here. Oliver took a quick look at Roger, ran up and tried rattling the bloody trapdoor again. He shook it so hard that he ripped his pyjama shirt.
Oliver looked behind him, hearing the voice of that agent again. He was coming closer. They were talking. How many were there? Five? Yes, five. Five agents. They were agents. Illuminati. Whatever. Shitty Illuminati agents that wanted to crap their johns open. Not guards. They were all agents, every one an agent.
Oliver ran back to Roger, shook him and denied the fact that Roger would never wake up again. That didn’t matter. In the face of death, we all try to survive.
“Please, wake up, Roger. Let’s try the window again.”
Oliver smelled his own scent. Sweat mixed with soot and dirt and old clothes. Who was he kidding? The blood was all over the place. Roger was dead. Dead. Dear God, he was a murderer. Not only was he now in an insane asylum. He was probably going to end up in the electric chair, man.
“I am dead,” Oliver spat to himself, sobbing. “I am so dead. Oh,” he screamed, “I didn’t mean to kill you, Roger.”
He felt like Sylvester the Cat feeling sorry for the fact that he had finally killed Tweety.
Oliver shook again, his stomach convulsing. No. Not again. He wanted to resurrect Roger. He couldn’t. The guy was dead. Dead as a doornail. Wasn’t that Dickens? Dead as a ... who cares? The flow of his intestants brewed inside.
With that, the second helping of that corn dog skyrocketed out of his belly and hit the white wall. Oliver grabbed his crotch and screamed, bashing his own fist against the wall.
“I am not giving up, stupid alien scum,” he hollared.
He shot up, ran to the window and rattled the bars. Then, with a click, the bars flew off the window, breaking off in his hands. His extraordinary pull threw him to the ground. The white bars flew away and hit the wall with a loud clanking noise. Oliver looked at the window, the wall, the bars, his own bloody hands. His breath was shallow again, his heartbeat fast. Free.
Oliver crawled over to Roger, shook him hard.
“Come on, guy,” he screamed. “We are free. The aliens can’t get us anymore. We can go. Wake up. Come on. Your dream has come true.”
Roger was wet, his face wet and lifeless. He was mumbling.
Alive? Bloody as an overworked hooker during a bad monthly period, but alive.
Oliver began shouting happily, dancing on the floor of that stupid hole he was in.
“You are alive,” he shouted. “Bloody as shit, but alive.”
“Oliver? Roger?”
“Roger, for the love of God,” Oliver whispered intensively. “Please wake up. Our dreams have come true. Now, we can escape and tell the world about this conspiracy. The little rainbow aliens can’t get us. The C.I.A. are powerless. But we have to leave now. They are at our heels. They are going to kill us.”
Oliver shook Roger. “Come on. Wake up.”
It was too late. Brain damage. Too bad. Oh. Gone. Gone. Too far gone.
Down the stairs came a man, holding a club of some kind in his hand. The other one, a skinny man, held a straight jacket.
Knowingly, he looked at Oliver and smiled.
The guard saw the blood, the open trap door, the mad look in Oliver’s eye.
The hatred. The conspiracy. The fear.
“Oliver,” the guard exclaimed, his chin dropping an inch. “What have you done?”
Fast as a bullet, Oliver was out of the window on the lawn.
Other people were there, people he had seen on the inside, now in the company of caretakers. Oliver ran and ran. All he could see was grass. Never before had he run so fast. His belly shook again.
“Not now, God. Please not now.”
Several men were a his heels and they all screamed words like: “The crazy guy!” or “He’s dangerous!” or “He’s a killer!”. In his mind, Oliver was back in the high school campus as a quarterback, but this was football from hell.
Oliver felt like a dog, panting his paws off, thhose stupid guards at his heels. Just a few hundred feet now. Maybe more, maybe less. Darn it, he would run like crazy all the way to Area 51. He would find it, he would search, eat poison ivy plant seeds and grass, if he had to. Whatever it took. Then, he would actually blow the biggest cover anyone had ever seen. The politicians and their horny lust for money. Their secrecy, the aliens and how long they had been here. The fear that the public was not ready to understand the truth.
He would go live on air, if he had to, and force people to listen.
But then Oliver stumbled. His feet hit something hard and round.
He saw himself in slow motion, lifting his feet and trying badly to set one of those feet down in order to actually remain in an upright position. There was no way. Roger’s corpse came to mind. Now, Oliver thought he would join his friend in the great beyond and no one would ever know about the little aging aliens with their invisible magic tricks.
Oliver fell, hit his chin and moaned, quickly got up, shuffling his feet like a dog paddling in deep water, hearing those darn guards again.
Oliver got back on his feet and as he did he felt the dried vomit now mixed with wet blood. A ball. Oliver laughed to himself, his chin hurting. Now, it was for keeps. He was a murderer, a criminal. There was no giving up now.
“They’re coming closer,” he told himself.
He fell, crawled up, running again.
He was close to the gate.
The agent could not get him now.
Oliver laughed. “Freedom. Sweet freedom. America will soon know what you guys are doing to us. The conspiracy will fai-...”
The whizzing sound of a flying object seemed strange to Oliver at first. He couldn’t place it, but who could place a sound like that in all the chaos? All that Oliver knew was that the pain made him cringe and shoot backward, making his own long hair tickle his back through his pyjamas. He reached for the needle that now stuck to his left buttock. It was small. The little darned thing was tiny, but Oliver knew what was in it. Modecate concentrate shot from a gun. An anti-psychotic serum used on lunatic sociopaths.
Oliver slowly turned around, facing those sinister looking guards. The gate behind him was open. Just a few feet now. But Oliver’s legs began to shiver and soon he would be giving way to all bodily fluids.
The man that stood opposite his countenance smiled knowingly.
Oliver suddenly knew that he had never once seen him before, not once in the three years he had been here.
The man was dressed in white, just like a male nurse would be dressed, but he was far too muscular and far too good looking to be a normal guard. Most prominent was the tattoo on his left arm that peeked out from under his white T-shirt. It was a skull-and-bones-tattoo. Oliver began smiling, the fluphenazine began working. He didn’t care anymore.
Tired, so tired of all this shit.
“Oliver, you know you must never leave the ward without guards. The cops will come and question you later. Now, let’s get back to your room. Seinfeld is coming in an hour. You love Seinfeld, don’t you?”
No. He didn’t want any straight jacket. Wrangling out, he hit his head. Now, four hands grabbed him and a third pair ripped off his pants and stuck another needle into his bottom.
The enormous pain felt like an arm being ripped off.
Then, the pain subsided and Oliver’s heart began to calm down.
His straight jacket was adjusted.
On the way back to Seinfeld, he heard a voice.
“I told you, you can’t escape. So, don’t even try.”
Oliver’s numb gaze met a little alien with a rainbow cap.
He was smiling.
“You’re safe here.”
Oliver fell asleep and dreamt about home.
This time, the alien stayed with him, never leaving his side.
When he woke up, he was not in the insane asylum any more.
A bright light shone in his face, making him wince.
What really meant something was that there was a small creature sitting on the desk right opposite his own leather chair. He smiled, speaking in a high voice. Oliver tried to untie those ropes that tied his hands to the chair. When he realized that he couldn’t, he stopped and looked restfully into the eyes of that small alien creature.
“Oliver,” the creature said. “We need to talk.”
“The hell we do,” Oliver screamed.
The creature smiled again, its four foot frame hopping down on to the floor and waddling, naked except for a small silver body suit, on to the back of the chair. The rope disappeared, Oliver was free and the alien hopped back on to the desk.
The big fat men behind the alien looked like they would have many important things to decide, they said nothing. They waited for the alien to decide everything.
“I trust you, Oliver, so I am going to ask you to cooperate.”
“How?”
The long silence that followed prompted chuckles in the back of the room. The light penetrated Oliver’s skull. “How did I get out of St. Helena’s Mental Institution? I killed someone in there.”
The alien shook his head.
“We made that all go away, Oliver,” the grey creature crooned. “All we want to know is how much you know.”
Oliver couldn’t believe it. First he was shot with a sleeping serum and dragged here and then they asked him to tell them about the damn plan to turn the world upside down?
He wanted to go back to the asylum and forget all about the bullshit, take his medicine, watch Seinfeld and pretend to be a loon. But now he was someone that was offered to become a conspirator. This conversation seemed too silly to take seriously. An alien talking to him about conspiracies? That could not be happening. Simon Wiesenthal would never turn Nazi and Oliver would never turn Illuminati.
“Everything,” Oliver said truthfully. “I know it all. After all, I researched this whole bullshit for years when the feds stuck me in that place and pumped me full of morphine.”
The alien smiled again.
“Then, we have to talk. You want to stop this race, we know that. But we may be able to talk better in the other room.”
The young man became insecure about all this kindness, wondering what the little alien actually meant. The other room? What other room?
The doors swung open and the sight that met his eye revealed a completely different scene. It made Oliver wonder if they had planned his escape all along, just waiting for him to appear here so that they could plant this stupid stunt in his skull.
A fully decorated room full of antiques beyond the door presented a dinner table filled with gastronomical delights. Oliver stood up, walking slowly into the room, his feet shuffling across the stoney ground onto elegant parquet floor. It felt like walking away from a prison and into the Versailles. A room like this in the middle of an army base in Nevada? What was this? Wine lay cooling in a silver ice-bucket, a steak lay ready to be devoured on a gilded plate next to a baked potatoe and a paté?
When Oliver again turned around, the alien now stood in the doorway of that other room, smiling. The fat cats behind him had not moved an inch, as if they, too, were induced with some sleeping serum.
“We can make all the charges disappear, Oliver, and we can turn you into a very wealthy man,” the alien said. “But we have to know that you are on our side.”
Oliver looked back toward the table, shivering.
And as his bowels again started turning upside down, he charged for the next room past the alien and past the desk, feeling his own bowel movements grinding his intestines.
He ran and ran faster than he knew into the darkness.
The same sensation again shot into his left buttock.
A needle hit his back.
This time, Oliver was gone faster.
He slumped down on to the ground and fell into a deep sleep.
When he awoke, he was back in the mental institution.
The slow rattling of metal attracted his attention.
The metal on his own skin reminded him of a truth that never would come true.
The truth of selling one’s soul to wealth.
As he raised his hands, he saw that he was handcuffed, while a sinister looking police officer told him that he had the right to remain silent.
Behind the police officer the small alien stood smiling and nodding.
This time, telepathic messages reached his mind.
The creature told him that no escape could ever present itself to him and that he could either tell him now that he would join the secret society or end up on death row.
And as Oliver was taken into custody that day, he dreamt of the asylum and how wonderful it had been to watch Seinfeld with all the other patients on Saturday nights.
The alien never left him.
Not even on death row.