TWENTY-EIGHT
Strange. Jeff felt strange like he was drifting through some kind of waking dream, or nightmare. Or would have felt strange he suspected if he could actually feel anything at all. Was feeling numb, the absence of feeling actually feeling at all?
He pulled the car over to the curb in front of the safe house and switched the engine off. And in doing so had the nagging doubt at the back of his mind that in doing so he was in some way a collaborator with the enemy. His clouded brain tried in vain to wrestle with the problem. He was on the good side, wasn't he? So why did he feel like a traitor?
Jeff shook his head but it didn't clear. Strange, surreal, not quite with it. Any of these would do fine to describe his present state. His memory of recent events was fading fast, he tried hard to remember just what exactly had happened over the last half an hour that had lead him to this point. Parked outside the safe house, that in itself was normal enough, he had done it countless times over the last few days. Nothing strange or surreal about that. It was just that this morning something was different, about him, about the whole world around him. But his befuddled state of mind couldn't unravel what it was. Jeff had never done drugs, he'd never even been drunk, but it was easy to imagine they both must feel something like this.
“I feel...” He said out loud, but couldn't think how to articulate further. The shadow man in the passenger seat next to him summed it up better than he ever could.
“Discombobulated?”
“Yeah,” he replied his lips feeling more numb by the second. That was as good a word as any.
“It's my new favourite word,” said his passenger.
Jeff rapped his knuckles on the steering wheel, quite hard, but what little sensation he had left was diminishing moment by moment. It was as if his nerve endings just about remembered how to register feeling, but that the memory was fading fast until, as he got out of the car and into what should have been the freezing early morning air, he felt nothing at all.
Mind you, he counted this a blessing as whenever he moved his head, the back of his skull where it was connected to his spine made the most alarming grating sound. He rubbed the back of his neck and suspected if his finger tips could feel anything the back of his neck would feel jagged.
For all his disorientation, Jeff's passenger was the only fixed point, the world was hazy at best, the sound muffled, but when the shadow man moved he was in sharp focus against the gloom, when he spoke it was crystal clear. In fact, hadn't it been the shadow man who had told Jeff to get out of the car just now? Just has he had told him to drive here, he also seemed to recall telling his passenger all about the safe house, who was in there and what protection they had.
Normally he would have rather died than impart that information to an enemy, but something about the man made it all okay. He was a traitor but that was okay to, as long as the shadow man was the one asking the questions, he was glad to answer them. Strange. The shadow man was the puppet master and Jeff the willing marionette dancing to whatever tune he called.
He stood there by the car as the puppeteer got out and joined him on the pavement and they both looked up at the safe house. Although now that he was here Jeff couldn't quite remember what was so safe about the place and the faces of those inside, faces he once, not so long ago, called friends were fading into the darkest recesses of his dying memory until they too would soon be shadows like his passenger.
Best not to try and think too much he told himself, so he waited there for the puppet master to tug on his strings. Suddenly out of the gloom in his head came a flash of realization. He turned to the shadow man who was smiling, he seemed a pleasant enough chap to Jeff, and even though he hadn't been instructed to speak, he needed to voice the realization before he forgot it all together.
“I'm dead, aren't I?”
“Sort of,” came the reply in a soft American accent.
American. Somewhere buried deep at the back of his fading mind Jeff knew that little fact was significant somehow.