Iglesia ……………………………………… Episode 20

(Iglesia is a serialized novel, published on Tuesdays and Saturdays at midnight ET, you can read all of the episodes by clicking on the tag.)

Previous Episode

….and he hadn’t heard.

All he had heard was the pounding of his nearly exploding heart in his ears, all he had seen was the tunnel of red rage intense focused at the treatment of his beloved mother. It was not until he had killed the man….not until he heard the shot, not until he saw them dragging her away…

He had not heard nor felt the the shot that had hit him as he was running towards her, and had not seen the shot that had hit her. And even after it registered that they must have killed her in response to his rage, and were now dragging her away…it was only at that sight that he released his hold on the dead mans throat….and it was only then that the fear and the sensation and the understanding and the despair had crashed in upon him …only then did he collapse. And it was then that his heart and his brain and his emotions began the process of unremembering.

They told him later that she was indeed, dead. They apologized, as they blamed him for her death. They told him that he would have been dead too, but for the fact that his mad charge…with a bullet in his thigh…and the feat of killing one of The Centers elite agents so quickly and instinctively with his bare hands had so impressed the squadron leader, that he had been scooped up from the place he had collapsed and brought along back to The Center as a trainee…instead of in a body bag.

.

From the place he sat now though, above it all, reviewing the ‘tape’ of this most traumatic time in his life, something felt …wrong. Even in this disembodied state, the scene had been enough to make him feel like he was reliving the panic of that time, but he was enough removed and objective …this time…to have noticed something was not as it had seemed. He ‘rewound’ and took a deep breath and watched the denouement again, this time focusing instead of on himself or on his mother….on the man who had taken hold of his mother after he grabbed the throat of the agent who had roughly dragged her from the computer trailer by her hair. Taken hold of her and raised her up for the boy to look at, to see the gun he held to her head. Yes, there it was.

Then he watched it again just to be sure….because he knew how powerful hope was, and the scene was so hectic and confused….but yes, this time there was no doubt.

His mother had NOT been shot.

The operative holding her had deliberately missed, shooting his gun behind her head. From his angle it looked as if she had been shot and since she had either fainted….wait, rewind….as the agent grabbed her from the hands of his soon to be deceased comrade he had stuck her with a needle and then grabbed his gun and raised her up…and pretended to shoot her! And then had drug her body off….

His mother was, quite possibly…alive.

After all these years of nihilistic despair stemming from the thought that he had killed her by trying to save her. After all the guilt and existential angst that had fueled his rage and kept fueling it and had driven him through his traumatic training. That had driven him, at last, all resistance gone, fully and finally into the arms and the dark clutches and darker purposes of The Center…it had been, everything had been, all a lie. Yet another mindfuck. Another purposely perpetrated psychological deception to go along with the drugs in his food and the deprivation and the manipulations and the exhaustion and the brutality and the insistent instilling of The Center’s mission and the propaganda and ….the false reality that all of his years at The Center had just turned out to be.

They had taken a raw boy and made him believe his mother was dead, that he had in essence killed her, so that they could then mold him and shape him and then point the killing machine they had painstakingly transformed him, body and mind into.

His mother had been high in the command structure of his village, his mother had been among the most technically adept and knowledgeable, his mother had had valuable information that they needed….his mother was, quite possibly…alive.

Snap

Penetration. A hammer blow so powerful that it went through him.

Snap

And….He was back in his body. Back on the hurtling train. Back kneeling naked on the steel floor. Back to feeling the still hot barrel of the gun of Smith against his temple. Back to knowing he was about to die.

And the hammer of the powerful handgun that had been moving in slowest motion now snapped down, and the firing pin now hit the cartridge, and the cartridge exploded, and the bullet on the end of the cartridge was propelled into his brain….and he thought and saw and felt… no more.