I’ve worked for the CIA for the last twenty years. My jobs vary, ranging from torture to weapons smuggling to chemical weapons manufacturing. When an insurgency begins in a hostile country, like Syria or Libya, my job sometimes required me to traffic in guns, ammo and money.
So I had seen a lot of things, and I felt a sense of relief when I was told that, from now on, I would only have to work within the United States. When my superior, Agent White, called me to his office one hot summer morning last year, I went right away.
“Sit down, Agent Black,” he said to me, motioning to the chair across the desk. “Do you want coffee or anything?”
“Sure,” I said, and he called his secretary to bring us both coffees. She hustled in, dropping the steaming hot cups in front of us and leaving immediately without a word.
“So,” he said, “we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter lately about the Chinese starting a mind control program.” I nearly choked on my coffee when he said that.
“That stuff is all bullshit, sir,” I said dryly. “You know it and I know it. The CIA tried that in the 60s, and they had no results. MKULTRA, MKOFTEN and CHICKWIT already covered that ground- unsuccessfully, I might add.” He smiled slightly at this.
“They had no results that they publicized, you mean,” he said. “The truth is slightly more nuanced. MKULTRA was not run with the kind of scientific vigor that we would bring to a modern experiment, however. They were basically just dosing people with huge doses of LSD or injecting them with amphetamines and barbiturates until they became drooling idiots. This is not the experiment we are interested in funding.”
“So what is?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“We want to see whether certain people can see the future, keeping them under controlled, scientific confinement in the process to rule out any kind of fraud or charlatanism. Also, we want to see if psychics can see military secrets in the present, secrets that we don’t currently have access to.
“Any advances in interrogation techniques achieved from the use of new drugs would also be funded. We are particularly interested in the potential of bromo-dragonFLY and alpha-PVP in test subjects. Both have caused nightmarish hallucinations in people accompanied by visions of hell, which could be useful for getting hardened subjects to talk.” He paused for a long moment after this, looking thoughtful. “And psychic research, of course.” I scoffed.
“Psychics?” I said scornfully. “Like from a circus? Are we bringing in Tarot card readers too?” He laughed.
“Sure, why not,” he said, handing me a slip of paper. “Report here tomorrow morning. It will be your first day with the researchers. We’ve decided to call it ‘Operation RAVEN’.”
***
I went to the address written in Agent White’s tiny, copperplate handwriting. By the time I pulled up to the front gate, the sun had just started to rise. I had always liked getting an early start.
Two armed guards sat at a booth, a red-and-white striped metal gate blocking the way inside. Behind them, I saw massive, brown buildings with no windows. The architecture looked brutalist. The buildings stood tall and imposing, forming perfect cubes of smooth concrete surrounded by row after row of razor wire.
“Identification?” a guard said, coming up to the window and putting out his left hand. He kept the other near his holstered pistol.
I opened my wallet and flashed my CIA credentials. After staring at it for a long moment, he nodded, going back to the booth and allowing the thick metal gates to slide open.
I had never been here before, and I was amazed by how many cars filled the parking lot. Hundreds of them stretched out in front of my eyes, and I drove around for five minutes before finding an empty spot towards the back. As I started the trek towards the door, I felt like eyes watched me from all directions.
I signed in again at the front desk of the complex, an armed security guard eyeing me mistrustfully as I pulled out my identification and badge. When I told him who I was and what I was doing there, he said to take the elevator to the bottom floor, then pretended to go back to reading his newspaper. Behind the rustling edges, though, I caught him glimpsing everyone that walked past with a soldierly intensity, ready to react at a moment’s notice.
I got in, seeing the building went all the way from -5 to 5. I pressed the button for -5, feeling the elevator quickly descending, my stomach rising with the motion.
When it dinged and the doors rolled open, I found myself standing in front of a large laboratory. A team of doctors, scientists and lab workers stood twenty feet away, forming a semi-circle around the steaming hot coffee pot in the corner. They discussed something in hushed tones, and when they saw me approaching, they all went silent.
“Hello,” I said calmly, stepping forward. “I’m Agent Philip Black. The Director sent me here to look at your work.” A female doctor stepped forward. Even though I towered over her five-foot-frame, she exhibited a kind of self-confidence that made her seem larger. Her black hair framed her thin face, and her eyes gleamed with intelligence. She smiled, showing straight, white teeth. Her stylish glasses reflected the bright fluorescent lights overhead.
“Nice to finally put a face with the fake name,” she said, grinning. “My name is Dr. Lander.” I didn’t react, simply looking around at the chemistry equipment and computers set up.
“Where do we keep the subjects?” I asked. She nodded at a narrow hallway at the far end of the large laboratory. “I’d like to see them.”
“You can see them all you want,” Dr. Lander responded, “but we’re about to start an experiment. Perhaps it would be better if you saw our research first-hand before talking to the subjects. Things will make more sense, I think, if you watch.”
“Sure,” I said, tearing my gaze away from the narrow hallway. It seemed to beckon me, cool and dark in the corner. I suddenly felt very hot, and the lights seemed too bright overhead.
Dr. Lander turned and headed towards a room in the corner. I saw a chair welded to the floor with straps hanging down from both sides. A bag of saline and a syringe filled with blue fluid stood on a metal tray next to a box of latex gloves. Two lab assistants stood at attention, one on each side of the chair. Dr. Lander chatted with one as we waited for the guards to bring the man in.
“This stuff, alpha-PVP, they call it flakka on the streets,” she said to the assistant. “In some subjects, it has caused visions of demons and hellfire. I think this is the same stuff that caused someone to eat another guy’s face with his bare teeth. We could also use amphetamine psychosis in weakening the subject’s will for interrogations, but the problem is they start to get delusional and their information…”
I stopped listening as two black-suited officers brought in a very hairy man. He was stout, barrel-chested and only about five-foot-six. But his arms and legs looked like tree trunks covered in thick, black hair. He had a unibrow and his eyes looked nearly black. A massive wizard beard hung down to his belly button. He wore a bright-orange prison jumpsuit.
“This is kidnapping!” he said in a thick Eastern European accent. “You cannot just come and tie people up and take them out of their homes!” Dr. Lander ignored his outburst, instead turning to me and the assistants as the guards strapped the man down in the chair. She raised the syringe filled with blue liquid so we could all see it.
“Now this here is a special combination of drugs we thought might be a good starting point. It is a combination of potent hallucinogens, including LSD-25, ALD-52, bromo-dragonFLY and the more potent purified isomer of alpha-PVP. We will be feeding the substances intravenously to the subject during interrogation and observing his reaction. Are there any questions?”
“Fuck you, you American pig,” the man in the chair said. The doctor ignored him.
“That’s not a question,” I said, trying to break the tension. No one laughed.
“OK, so let’s start running the solution then. For the recording, this is subject 102202, Vladimir Greika.” She nodded at the lab assistant who stood next to the IV line feeding into the man’s arm. “Go ahead.” The lab assistant, a thin man with large glasses and a balding hairline, took the syringe and gingerly screwed it into the plastic tubing taped to the man’s arm.
The blue fluid mixed with the clear saline as it fed into the man’s veins, the dark cyanotic color lightening as it went. The subject, Vladimir, continued to hiss and scream at the doctor and her assistants. His eyes met mine, and I noticed they looked rather strange. When I first saw him, I remember thinking about how dark his eyes looked. But now the iris had turned a muddy yellow, like a tiger’s eye gemstone.
His scowl had turned into a grin, and his teeth appeared to sharpen and lengthen. They looked dark and stained, with the serrated points covered in a thick, yellow film.
“Where were you during the massacre of your family on April 10th, 2022?” Dr. Lander asked Vladimir. His muscles seemed to grow before my eyes, ripping through his clothes. He gnashed his teeth as foamy saliva dripped from his mouth. She sighed. “OK, prepare round two of the drug combination on my…”
“I was with my family, of course, you stupid bitch,” Vladimir said, his voice deepening and turning into a growl. The black hair on his body looked like it had grown, and even his hands and face were now covered. “I had changed. I was hungry, so hungry. They tried running through the forest, but I could see far better in the darkness than they could. I took them one by one, ripping them apart as they screamed and begged for mercy. That was my own wife and three daughters.” He leaned forwards in his chair as claws sprouted from his fingers, as white as ivory and as sharp as scalpels. “So what do you think I’ll do to you when I get out of this goddamned chair?”
With a roar, the beast in the chair pulled against the straps. For a few moments, it looked like they would hold. And then, with a ripping noise, they all gave way at once. The man had fully transformed into a wolfish abomination, and silver streams of saliva ran from his grinning mouth.
“Code silver, code silver!” Dr. Lander screamed as she began to run towards the door. The thin male lab assistant stood there, quivering and trembling, the bald spot on his head turning a bright red. The other assistant, a young blonde woman, sprinted past me. I stood there shocked for a moment, not knowing what to do. But my instincts screamed at me to stay with Dr. Lander. Without waiting to see what would happen, I turned and started sprinting for the door.
“Shut the door, shut the door!” Dr. Lander cried as the three of us ran out of the room. I looked at the heavy steel door with its shatterproof glass window.
“What about your assistant?” I said. She shook her head.
“It’s too late! He’s already dead! Close the door before it gets out!” She shoved me aside as her and the blonde assistant each grabbed an edge. With a groan, they slammed it closed. Dr. Lander bent over double, hyperventilating. She looked up at her assistant. “Good job, Kasey. Quick thinking.”
I looked in the windowpane and saw the male assistant running towards the door, covered in blood. He definitely was not already dead. I gave Dr. Lander a skewed, mistrustful look.
“Let me out, please!” the assistant pleaded as he slammed his bloody fist against the small window. With glowing, yellow eyes and greasy, black fur covering every inch of his body, Vladimir looked like something straight out of a medieval textbook on occultism. He lept high into the air and came down on the assistant’s back, clawing and gnashing his teeth as shreds of fabric and drops of blood flew everywhere.
Dr. Lander stared into the room, her eyes as emotionless as that of a marble statue. The blonde assistant shifted nervously from foot to foot, her face flickering from Dr. Lander to the window and back again.
“Aren’t we going to help?” Kasey, the blonde assistant, said. A moment later, the wall shook as the werewolf slammed into the male assistant again, knocking him to the floor. I saw the assistant smear his own blood all across the white walls as he tried to crawl away from the beast, holding one side of his neck with his left hand. Bright red blood spurted between his fingers and soaked his lab coat.
The beast jumped and flew across the room. The assistant twisted his body so that he was laying on his back, putting his arms out in a defensive posture. In a blur, the werewolf landed back on top of the prone man. It began clawing at his chest and face as the assistant to put his hands up and shield his eyes. I saw its claws slice through his fingers like a sharp knife through hot butter. The four digits fell to the side, the man’s spurting hand still raised high in the air as he lay on the ground. I heard his gurgling breaths as he began choking on his blood.
I heard Kasey gasp and suppress a cry of horror as she watched the final moments of the brutal act. In a show of mercy, the beast knelt down and placed his ivory-white teeth over the male assistant’s throat. Then he bit deeply into the man’s neck and, with a sickening spray of blood and a ripping sound, finally killed the poor bastard.
***
“Well, that was a massive failure,” I said spitefully as we walked away from the gruesome murder scene.
“Why would you say that?” Dr. Lander asked politely, her large, brown eyes turning to regard me.
“I mean, your guy is definitely dead,” I responded with incredulity. “Is that not a problem? Do you go through assistants like toilet paper here?”
“Sometimes to make an omelet, you have to crack a few eggs, right?” Dr. Lander answered, smirking. Kasey was sweating heavily and shifting uncomfortably from leg to leg. I think she may have been reassessing her career choice at that moment. “That was actually the most information we have gotten out of Vladimir so far. Normally, he just blacks out when the topic of his family is brought up. So the hallucinogenic drug mixture is already exceeding expectations. I think we need to try it again on a few more people.
“But anyways, we have another experiment planned within a few minutes. We’ll put a pin in this for now.” The werewolf continued to shred the dead body in the interrogation room behind us. I heard bones cracking and ripping, squelching sounds.
“I hope the next one isn’t so… wet?” I inquired. Dr. Lander only gave me a cryptic half-smile.
Once the notice for code silver got relayed to the ground floor, chaos broke out. A team of men in bulletproof vests and military gear came running out of the elevator, heading in the direction of the interrogation room. I saw they carried special long-barreled tranquilizer guns rather than automatic rifles.
“What do you use to put down a werewolf?” I asked, genuinely curious. I watched as one soldier flung open the door and a few others stuck their guns in. I heard soft popping sounds as they fired. Within seconds, they pulled them back out and the door slammed shut again.
“Oh, it’s a special blend we developed here,” she said. “Normal tranquilizers don’t work on them. A super-potent opioid like etorphine that would take down an elephant just slows them down. So we use a combination of etorphine, carfentanil and phencyclidine. Even that is sometimes iffy, and it takes a massive dose just to sedate them. They have a very strange neuropharmacology compared to normal animals. For some reason, they’re highly susceptible to synergistic effects from NMDA antagonists, yet a pure opioid agonist has little effect.”
“Yeah, I really don’t know what that means,” I said.
We came to another cell with a clear plexiglass shield covering the entire front entrance. I peered through, wondering what other oddities lay down here in the heart of Operation RAVEN.
***
I looked back down the steel reinforced halls just in time to see three men in SWAT gear dragging Vladimir’s unconscious body along the floor. He had partially returned to his human state. Now he looked more like a Neanderthal covered in thick black hair, his strange claws fused to the stubs of his fingers. His face was saturated with coagulated blood. Pieces of gore and shredded skin stuck to the entire front of his now naked body. Remnants of his orange jumpsuit littered the hall, small pieces of bloody cloth falling to the sides as they pulled him by his arms towards another nearby metal cell with a bulletproof glass front.
“OK, our second experiment for the day is a little different,” Dr. Lander said as she stopped in front of another cell. Looking down the hallway, I saw that each of the rooms on both sides had prisoners. Most were men, but I saw some women and even a few children locked behind the glass walls. I estimated that at least fifty people must live here as subjects in hellish experiments.
Dr. Lander pointed at a woman laying on her steel bed, her face turned away from us towards the wall. I saw a few photos on the walls, mostly pictures of small children grinning for the camera in their best clothes.
“Mrs. Vaber?” Dr. Lander said politely, her light voice echoing off the cold metal and concrete walls of the building. “Can we please talk to you?” The woman continued to ignore us. “OK, well, we’re coming in. You know the rules.” Dr. Lander nodded at Kasey, who quickly took a massive ring of keys out of her pocket. With a click, she turned the lock in the ballistic glass front. The clear glass door slid to the side. I looked down the hall and saw a couple armed guards watching us with consternation.
They’re probably afraid of another code silver, I thought to myself as I entered the cell.
***
“This is subject 171041, Mary Vaber. For the recording,” Dr. Lander began. Mrs. Vaber still just stared at her wall, refusing to talk or turn her body. All I could see of her was auburn hair and an orange prison jumpsuit. I wondered if she was dead, or perhaps in a deep catatonic state, like some schizophrenics experience.
“What’s the point of this?” I asked in a low voice to Dr. Lander. “Can this woman even talk?”
“Yes, she is physically capable of speech,” Dr. Lander said, which didn’t seem like an answer to the question. “We just have to get it out of her.”
“What are we testing?” I asked.
“Psychic research,” she answered. “Mrs. Vaber here is capable of seeing events occurring in other parts of the world. Remote viewing, I believe they call it. Her powers extend beyond that, but I’d like to see if we can get any results on smaller details before moving onto larger ones.” Dr. Lander turned away from me towards Kasey.
“OK, let’s flip her over. Mrs. Vaber, we’re going to move you so that we can have access to you during the experiment.” She nodded at Kasey, and with a grunt, they spun Mrs. Vaber around to face us. When I saw her face, I gasped.
Her eyes shone a bright red, without pupil or iris. Covered in a film of blood, they looked demonic, vampiric even. Yet the blood, if that’s what it was, didn’t overflow. No crimson tears flowed down her face or stained her eyelids.
She didn’t look old, perhaps in her late 30s. She might have been pretty with her wavy, auburn hair and creamy, white skin. Yet the bloody demon-eyes and blank, statuesque expression on her face ruined whatever beauty she possessed.
“Mrs. Vaber, if you ever want to see your family again, you have to cooperate with us,” Dr. Lander said, her tone cold. I thought the use of the word “see” impolitic under the circumstances. When Mrs. Vaber’s face continued to show as much expression as a statue’s, Dr. Lander turned to the assistant. “Please give the injection.”
Kasey took a needle out of her pocket. It had a colorless liquid inside of it.
“Is this stuff similar to the last experiment?” I asked nervously, taking a step back. “LAD-whatever and alpha-PCP?” Kasey lifted the plastic tubing taped into one of Mrs. Vaber’s veins and began injecting the drug before pulling out a saline syringe to flush the line. She exhibited a degree of nonchalance I could only characterize as “outstanding”, especially for someone who’s work partner just got murdered by a werewolf a few minutes ago.
“This ‘stuff’ is a new experimental substance,” Dr. Lander said proudly. “We have had some results using it on people with latent psychic powers. You won’t find it on the streets.”
“Was is it?” I asked nervously. She paused for a long moment, as if lost in thought.
“You know what DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is? It occurs naturally in the brain, and it also causes out-of-body experiences and mystical experiences in most people.”
“Of course I know what DMT is,” I said. “You know, when the Soviets did their own version of MKULTRA back in the day, they mostly used DMT instead of LSD.”
“Well, this new stuff makes DMT look like ginger beer,” she said confidently. “The lab used DMT as a starting point, but with tweaks of chemistry, we found something far stronger.” She pulled out a clear, sealed vial and threw it to me with an underhand toss. I read the label carefully: “4-fluoro-HO-DMT”, it read. “Experimental drug. Not approved by the FDA or DEA. Not for human consumption.” I gave it back and she tucked it into a random lab coat. I looked back over at Mrs. Vaber and gasped.
Translucent white light flowed out from her body, from every pore on her skin and every hair. It circulated over her like water, flowing and reforming. Her mouth formed an “O” of horror and fear, a silent scream dying in that gaping black hole.
Kasey stood next to the woman, her eyes wide as she backed up a couple steps. She looked like she wanted to turn and run.
“I think we’ve just turned the lights on,” Dr. Lander said, “and now it’s time to see if anyone’s home.” She checked her watch, counting down the seconds. After about thirty seconds, she sighed, turning to Kasey. “Give her another dose, please.” Kasey seemed to grow paler, but she took another syringe filled with the clear liquid and began to inject it into the line. By the time she had flushed the last of the substance out of the line with saline, the light swirling around Mrs. Vaber had become blinding.
She suddenly sat up on her thin mattress, her face still formed into a silent scream. Her fingers began to twitch. Her arms jerked. Then her face smoothed into a placid, statuesque expression. Her head slowly turned until she was staring directly at me with those blood-red, sickly eyes.
“Whatever you do, don’t touch her,” a voice said from behind me, sounding like it came from far away. I felt like I was drifting off as I stared into her eyes. I realized I was becoming hypnotized. A hand on my shoulder ripped me back to reality. I spun, backing up into the metal wall. “And don’t stare into her eyes.” I looked and saw Kasey standing there, a look of empathy on her young face.
“Mrs. Vaber, I’m going to ask you a few questions, OK?” Dr. Lander said in a falsely cheerful voice. Mrs. Vaber’s mannequin-like face turned to stare at Dr. Lander blankly, but Dr. Lander didn’t return her stare. “What is your full name?” I didn’t think she would answer, but after a moment, she did.
“Mary Louise Vaber,” she whispered in a blank, robotic voice.
“OK, good,” she said, writing something on a clipboard. “And do you have knowledge of things happening outside this cell at this moment?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Vaber said simply. “I can see all of it.”
“Give me an example,” Dr. Lander pressed.
“I know you haven’t changed your underwear in two days,” Mrs. Vaber said. “Does that suffice?” Dr. Lander scratched something down on a clipboard.
“That’s technically something inside this room,” Dr. Lander said, unperturbed. “Can you tell me something happening in China right now?”
“Xi Jinping is discussing three potential Taiwan invasion strategies with his staff,” Mrs. Vaber said. “They want the invasion to start by 2025 at the latest. Does that count?” Dr. Lander scribbled something, frantically writing out a much longer response on her clipboard than any of the other answers elicited.
“And Mrs. Vaber, do you know why you’re here?”
“Because I killed a school full of children,” she droned. “They told me seventy of them died.” Dr. Lander made a few quick scratches on her clipboard.
“And do you know how you killed them?” Dr. Lander asked. The floor vibrated, as if an aftershock had passed underneath our feet. I looked worriedly at Dr. Lander, but she didn’t respond. Mrs. Vaber’s face formed into a wide smile. It reminded me of the death mask of a tetanus patient- an insane, rictus grin that showed no compassion.
“Slowly,” she said, drawing the word out, “like I’m about to do to you.” As she finished speaking, the light around her body expanded into a blinding flash. I backed up towards the door instinctively. I saw Kasey doing the same. Once the light had cleared, Dr. Lander still stood there, but she wasn’t alone with Mrs. Vaber anymore.
Thousands of writhing black spiders began appearing and falling off her body, like a bubbling stream overflowing its banks. Dr. Lander looked down in astonishment for a fraction of a second before turning to run. The stream of crawling predators swarmed around her, however, running up her sneakers and legs. I saw large brown recluses covering her chest and countless tiny black widows sneaking into her clothing. She began to shriek in horror and pain.
“Close the goddamned door!” I screamed. Kasey and I both started pushing on the sliding glass door as the spiders swarmed towards us. A few crossed the threshold, and a rising sense of panic began to overtake me. Then, with a bang, it flew shut, slicing some of the larger brown recluses in half.
A small stream of a few black widows skittered towards my shoes, but I began stomping them, seeing their tiny bodies squashed onto the concrete floor below. Next to me, I heard Kasey breathing hard, muttering some incomprehensible prayer.
I looked back in the cell and saw Dr. Lander stumbling around, a sprinting human pillar of spiders. They swarmed in her mouth, in her ears and eyes and nose, biting, skittering and jumping all over her body. She shrieked over and over, trying to pull them out of her mouth and nose, trying to smash her body against the wall to kill them, but after a few more seconds of countless bites, her voice began to give out. She tried to walk towards the door, putting her arms out towards us, then stumbled and fell. Her arms and legs still twitched as she died on the cold floor below us.
“We’d better go call a code black for this,” Kasey said regretfully.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re right,” I said. “I’m sure the guards will love this one.” Kasey shrugged.
“They’re used to it,” she said.
“This project is going to need a lot of work,” I said, turning to face Kasey. “Do you still want to be a part of Operation RAVEN after all this?”
“As long as you’re in charge,” she said, smiling, “always.”
I’m not going to say where we live. I’m not going to use our real names.
All of this happened. If any of it sounds familiar or it’s happening to someone in your life, go to the doctor. Don’t wait. People have already died, and we’re not being told.
This is how it started for us.
-
“You haven’t noticed how distant you’ve been the last couple of days?”
“No. Um… I have no idea why. I feel fine. A little depressed, but nothing more.”
My husband promised me and the kids he would do better. I thought maybe it was because he was about to turn forty. We had just got back from our trip to Disneyworld and as far as he was concerned, everything was great.
He ran a small fever for a couple of days after we got home, and it took a while for his ears to pop from the plane, other than that, everything seemed normal.
I felt guilty for having to say something about him being distant. I had to. It was completely out of his character.
A week went by. He was complaining that he felt like crap all the time, but he had no idea why. He was sweating. I made him go to the doctor and they said that he had a sinus infection. Lots of mucus in his sinuses and excessive build up in his ears. They gave him some antibiotics and sent him home.
He woke up one night in a cold sweat. He told me his fingernails were burning. Like there was something underneath them. I had never heard that before. He took a couple of aspirin and tried to go back to sleep.
He didn’t.
A few days went by and he had not slept at all. His mood was worse. He kept flexing his fingers; they were constantly moving.
I looked things up on the internet to see if someone else had ever had the same issue.
Nothing.
One night I woke up and he wasn’t in bed. I found him in the kitchen soaking his hands in the sink. The water was pouring out of the faucet and steam was fogging the kitchen window. He had a box of epsom salts right next to him on the counter.
“George? What are you doing?”
“Oh! Nothing! Go back to bed baby. I’ll be right there.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
I walked into the kitchen, and I could tell that he was trying to hide whatever was in the sink from me. When I got closer, I could see that the water in the sink had a pink hue.
I turned my head. There was a pair of needle nosed pliers on the kitchen island.
“Oh my God! George?!”
“I’m ok. Seriously, look at me. I’m ok. I feel way better. I know how this looks.”
He had removed every nail from every finger.
“It looks crazy!”
“I know. I watched some videos on how to safely do it.”
“Are you insane? How to safely do it?!”
“There was just this little voice in my head that gave me the answer. I took a couple of pills after I was done. The pain is gone. I’m not running a fever. I feel great.”
-
I wanted him to see a doctor the next day, and he agreed. I should have insisted that I go along just to make sure he went, but I didn’t.
He never went to the doctor. He told me later that something told him not to.
He slept like a baby for two days. He even called off a day from work. Other than the bandages on all of his fingers, he was himself again.
I told him I wanted him to see a therapist. I was worried.
The morning of the third day, I found him in the garage. He was staring at the wall. He was speaking. It sounded like he was speaking backwards, but he wasn’t.
The words he was saying were in english, but they were all garbled up. A kind of verbal dyslexia. Word fragments that were smashed together at random. That’s the only way I can describe it.
When I walked over and shook him, he immediately snapped out of it like nothing was wrong at all.
“Just sleepwalking I think. I think I was dreaming that I was having a conversation myself.” He laughed it off, got dressed and then went to work.
He came home five hours later. He had threatened to kill a coworker. They fired him. They didn’t call the police because he agreed to leave.
He had no explanation. He was as dumbfounded and terrified as I was.
“I don’t even remember doing any of it. I barely remember coming home. What’s going on with me?”
“I don’t know. We need to get you in to see someone.”
-
I worried he had a brain tumor. I made him an appointment for the next morning.
He began running a fever again in the early evening. I had my sister take the kids for the night. After I dropped them off, I ran to the store to pick up some medicine.
When I got home, I could hear him inside crying.
I opened the door, and the walls of the entryway had been broken and torn out in several places. He was crying in our bedroom at the back of the house.
As I walked through, I could see that he had torn gaping holes in every wall. The bits of wall and the insulation inside had been yanked out and thrown all over the house. Bloody handprints were everywhere.
I found him in our bedroom. He was naked and crumpled in the corner. A sledge hammer was on the floor next to him. His fingers were dripping; the bandages had fallen off.
“Holly! Holly, what the hell is wrong with me?!” He was covered in sweat and his own blood from his hands. He was burning up.
“Oh my God!”
“Holly? Something is wrong?”
“You’re burning up bad.”
“There’s something in the walls baby… I can hear it… it won’t stop talking to me… it’s driving me crazy.”
“You need an ambulance.”
“I need an ambulance.”
I ran to the bathroom and started an ice cold bath. I had no idea how long it would take for an ambulance to get there. We live twenty miles from town.
I called 911 while I dumped all of the ice from the freezer into the bath. There wasn’t much, so I threw every bit of frozen food we had into the water as well. I went back into the room to help him up.
His body was so slick, it was hard for me to get a grip on him. He was barely able to walk to the bathroom, and he slipped and fell into the tub. I heard a bone snap in his leg, but he didn’t even react to it. It was the water he reacted to.
“Too cold. No…too cold…”
He was trying to get out of it. He was starting to speak in those jumbled words. He was begging me to help him out of the cold water.
I tried to explain to him that he needed to cool down and then he started convulsing.
I didn’t know what to do. I held his head above the water and I tried to keep him from thrashing around and hurting himself. I could see that his leg was broken. It flopped around in the tub like a rubber snake.
His head kept going underneath the water. I was struggling to keep his face above it. I could hear the ambulance coming outside and he slowly stopped convulsing.
I felt something warm spill onto my hand that was around his head.
A large insect that looked like a millipede wriggled out of his ear onto the top of my hand. I instinctively jerked away, and I saw the bug plop down into the water.
I pulled him out of the tub; my only thought was to get him away from the thing. I couldn’t get him out.
I could only push the water next to it with my hand, sending it towards my husband’s feet.
I watched the insect writhe and convulse, until finally, it quit moving.
“What’s going on?”
“George?”
“Why am I so tired? Help me… ”
-
By the time we got to the emergency room, my husband’s fever was gone. He was speaking normally. Other than his broken leg and his hands, he was fine.
I had scooped the insect out of the bath water with a plastic bag and I gave it to the doctor at the emergency room. I was surprised when he quickly stuck it in his coat pocket.
He didn’t ask me any questions about it.
They wanted to keep George overnight for observation. They gave him a sedative that would finally knock him out. I fell asleep in the chair next to his bed.
-
It was the middle of the night when a new doctor I had not seen before came back into the room. As my eyes focused, I saw that he had his finger over closed lips and he was carrying a few items.
He squatted next to my chair and whispered.
“I need to check something. Please be silent. Ok?”
I nodded.
He went over to my husband and moved his head to the right. He put some metal tools, a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a small plastic container on the bedside table and then he shined a light down into my husband’s ear. I watched him use a metal tool to scrape along the inside of George's ear.
I heard a pop.
He grabbed a pair of long tweezers and used them to pull out a tumor of some kind from George’s ear. A moist sack about the size of a small grape. He plopped the tumor into the plastic cup, grabbed the bottle of rubbing alcohol and then walked over to me.
He squatted down and took one of his fingers and pushed on the tumor until it popped. Inside of it were hundreds of tiny worms. They were crawling all over each other.
I stared at them while he whispered.
“Your husband is a very lucky man. I’m glad you got here when you did. This was about to hatch. Usually the mother stays until it does. The freezing water must have driven her out of her warm little nest. The little ones feed on her when they break out. They spread inside the host. It would have driven your husband completely mad, but not before the offspring would have spread to you and your children and any pets in your house.”
The doctor placed the plastic cup down on the floor and poured some of the rubbing alcohol into it. All of the small worms convulsed and then slowly stopped moving.
The doctor looked back up at me.
“What I’m about to tell you, I can’t say out loud. There’s too much money involved. Have you been to Florida, Alabama, or Mississippi lately?”
“We just got back from Disneyworld a couple of weeks ago.”
“Well this is all I’m going to say. Your husband is going to be ok. Lots of doctors and coroners back east are having similar cases, and those that are speaking up are losing their credentials. Doctors will treat it, but it’ll never be documented. They will never acknowledge it. I’m not going to.
No one is listening, because they’re paid not to. The people who caused this are trying to figure out how to fix it. They won’t. It’s going to get worse.
When you have billionaires genetically modifying insects and introducing them into the wild, you’re going to get mutations. Not just from those insects, but from the normal insects who feed on them. Those mutations that they insist are a myth right now, are starting to spread. Stay away from anyone who acts like your husband has been.”
He got up and left.
My husband’s symptoms were attributed to a psychotic episode.
I warned my close family and friends, but I felt like that wasn’t enough. That’s why I wrote this and I’m leaving it here.
Try and stay safe.
