Chapter 44: Blood Brothers

“I can’t believe I fucking missed it!” Sergeant Thomas said as he ran his fingers over his high-and-tight haircut. “I can not fucking believe it!” It nearly became a personal mantra to the sergeant after two of his men followed a line of clues no one else thought about and found new evidence in the disappearance of their guest.

After a few more moments of rubbing his fingers through his no-longer existent hair, Sergeant Thomas wanted to make sure he understood what his men had just reported to him. “Lay it out for me one more time. I wanna make sure we got it right before we take it to the Colonel.”

“Yes, s-s-s-sergeant,” Corporal Eddie Smith answered. “I-I-I-I’ll do my-y-y best,” he continued but looked to his friend who worked the line of clues right alongside with him.

“Lemme tell ya what happened, Sarge,” Corporal Tommy Johnson, Corporal Smith’s best friend said while attempting to interrupt.

“Nah. It’s alright, Johnson,” Sergeant Thomas answered and looked right at Corporal Smith. “Look, Smith, I believe you. I think you are on the right track. I just wanna make sure you didn’t miss anything. And another thing, I don’t give a flying fuck about your stuttering. If I did, I would have kicked your ass off this unit the second I heard you stutter, but you know what, Eddie?” he asked the dumbstruck soldier, who shook his head no. “You are a damned good soldier. I feel better when I know you are around. Did you know the only time you don’t stutter is when you’re in the middle of some shit – bullets flyin’, alarms screaming, explosions galore? We are all showing our nerves on our sleeves, and you are some Shakespearean actor delivering a difficult soliloquy. It’s very refreshing and eases my nerves. That’s why I don’t rightly care about your stuttering.”

Both corporals were smiling, especially Corporal Smith who was being lightly shaken on his shoulders by his sergeant. “So run it by me again, please.”

“Okay, Sir. I got to thinking about what happened to Morales and Kingsley,” Corporal Smith began.

“You’re talking about the flat tire they got when they were following the Three Amigos up to that mall on the other side of town?”

“Yes. Exactly. I know they were able to catch up with the Three Amigos while they were eating lunch at that mall, but what was b-b-b-biting me in the ass was why did they drive halfway across the city for b-bland pizza in a food court. There are several other franchises of that pizza place on this side of town without having to navigate inside a very popular mall and its parking lots. We know they didn’t buy anything at the mall. It appeared they just went to the food court for lunch and then came back to work. Who in their right minds would waste the majority of the lunchtime driving halfway across town for the same pizza they could get at the exact same franchise at a mall ten minutes north of us.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far. Go ahead.”

“So, on a hunch, we checked with the mall security to see if maybe their security cameras showed them meeting with anyone while they were at the food court.”

Corporal Smith spun around to look at his partner who was now holding up a memory stick. Both looked at each other then smiled at their sergeant. He quickly returned the smile and grabbed the memory stick.

“Gimme that,” Sergeant Thomas said with nearly as big of a smile as the two soldiers. The sergeant turned in his chair to an open computer and brought up the video files copied from the security office of the mall. It took a few minutes to set up the timestamp to the proper time when the three lab employees appeared.

They found the three men sitting on the outskirts of the food court, trying hard to look like they weren’t scanning everyone in the food court. A few minutes later, a good-looking man with a tray full of different food bags sat a table closer to them than to any empty tables and began a conversation. Early into their conversation they all looked toward a side of the food court and noticed the two beautiful Latinas enjoying the food court. One tried to look away when the men turned, and the other raised the newspaper she was reading higher.

George Johnson, the head of security for the lab where they all worked, made his way to the two ladies. A conversation between the three finished with George returning to the other men and the two women gathering their items and leaving the food court through the exit on the far side of the food court from the men having their meeting.

The video showed the Three Amigos, along with their guest, finish their spirited discussions in a few minutes. They all left via the exit on their side of the food court – the same entrance from which the amigos entered. The videos did not show when the other man entered.

“Tell me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that guy they met look like Johnson’s new house guest?”

“Exactly, Sarge! I recognized him as the same guy who showed up at Johnson’s house that same night, and he has been staying there ever since. We ran the fingerprints and the long, black hair samples from the house to the lab. We put on a rush and used the colonel’s name to hopefully expedite things. I hope that’s okay,” Smith asked.

“Well, I guess that depends on what you guys found.” The colonel’s booming voice quickly caught everyone’s attention, as he was standing behind the group watching and re-watching the food court video. They all immediately stood at attention. “At ease, all of ya. What do you guys have here, Sergeant Thomas?”

“Smith and Johnson here exercised a little initiative and found something we all missed about the Three Amigos,” Sergeant Thomas started explaining but was interrupted by the colonel.

“Three Amigos? Who the hell is that?”

“George Johnson and the two Mikes who were all present when ‘the guest’ first appeared.”

The colonel shook his head and snickered while repeating the new moniker bestowed by the rank and file of the CID-SI. “Three Amigos. Okay, I guess it fits them.” He looked back up at his sergeant and motioned for him to continue. “Now, what did we miss that these fellas found?”

“They followed up on the day the other team lost the amigos when they had a flat tire and lost them for just under an hour but caught them as they were finishing lunch in the food court of North Star Mall on the other side of San Antonio.”

“What did they find?”

“Well, here, see for yourself, sir.”

Smith realized the footage would need to be seen again so, while the sergeant read their commander in on what they had found, he had reset the video at the right time for the colonel to begin watching. After finishing the video, the colonel knew the two men had done a great job.

“Go ahead and compare this guy to the footage we have of Johnson’s cousin and let’s confirm they are the same. Also, check him against the footage from Walmart. I have a hunch he is gonna be the same guy. Lastly, get a good shot of the guy from all three videos, and we’ll do face checks with the front desk clerk at that hotel and see if that was the guy who left just before we got there.”

The colonel got up from the computer and shook each of the men on their shoulders and gave out rare compliments. “Excellent work. Now, finish tying all these loose ends into knots and let’s bring this thing in so we can have a nice conversation with the Three Amigos and their cousin from outta town. Damn good work, men. Damn good work!”

The colonel started to walk back to his office but stopped short. “Who are those girls?” He stepped back to the seat he was in and sat back down. “Who are the girls that George Johnson went to talk to? Were they following him? Can we get an identification on them?”

“The footage from the security office is good but not high enough resolution to get a good picture of them. We can get pics for our team to keep an eye out for possible identification,” Sergeant Thomas answered.

“Well, sir, we could always just ask security chief Johnson. They obviously know each other,” Corporal Smith slipped out before he could edit himself. Corporal Johnson and Sergeant Thomas both let out short gasps. It actually made the colonel smile.

“That’s a good idea, Smith.” Colonel Price mused for a moment. “But we better lay off on that for a while. Best if we keep the chief out of the loop on what is going on. We suspect him, but we really don’t have any evidence of wrongdoing. Oh, he’s got some weird shit happening during our investigation, but we need to keep him thinking we are looking elsewhere and not at him.”

The group all agreed, but the colonel wanted to drive home one more point. “Get an ID on those two women and then see if we can get confirmation on the chief’s cousin. I know we already ran his prints and found his backstory, but something just does not add up for me,” he said as if talking to himself. “If we get confirmation that this guy from the food court and the visitor are the same, then we can think about bringing them in for a ‘discussion.’”

He gathered himself and congratulated his men again and, this time made it into his office.

“So sir, why do you have my scientist nephew doing all kinds of dastardly deeds behind the back of the government overseers for whom he works? Why are he and these other fellers risking their necks for you?” Uncle Justin asked while staring straight at Tim. Tim also noticed that Jose was standing a few steps behind Justin and had his hand behind his back waiting to strike.

“Did your nephew tell you how we met?”

“Yes, some story about possible time-travel and you showing up outta nowhere.”

Tim smiled and sat down. “Well, let me start by saying I am a time-traveler but, on my return trip, something happened and brought me here to the exact date I left, but nothing was quite the same as I left.”

“What do you mean?”

“I went back in time to try and change my life for the better. I gave myself a way to restart my life and hopefully make it a better one. I visited myself in the past and gave myself a series of nanites – microscopic robots small enough to make changes to the human anatomy.” The confused look on Justin’s face told Tim to try to expand on his explanation. “From the time where I came from, we had created nanite technology and were just beginning to experiment on a larger scale. It is still a costly procedure, and only a select few have been ... upgraded -- I guess that’s the best term I could use. The nanites are still very expensive and can only be created and used for a specific person’s DNA. I was able to convince my friends who created the nanites to make some extras for me since I was one of the original ‘lab rats’ given the first experimental treatment. It worked almost exactly how they wanted them to work. I am faster, stronger and smarter than any other person alive.”

“Alright, so you finagled another set of these nanites to give to yourself in the past in the hopes of fixing your future. Do I have the main idea, so far?” Uncle Justin asked.

“Yes. Exactly, but the nanites I had already in my body were basically highly structured in what they could do. They only increased certain things to a certain level and then stopped. They didn’t make me look like the biggest, strongest or fastest. They just fixed my health and kept me looking the same. Just about six foot tall even and damn near four hundred pounds. If I really think about it, my pride got me into all this mess.”

“Okay. I understand up to that. Now, lemme see if I can figure out what happened. You went back in time and gave the nanites to your past self, what, in your early teens or early adulthood?”

“Early teens; specifically, the summer before going to high school. I figured the body and mental improvements could be covered up by growing pains.”

“Do you know if you convinced yourself in the past to upgrade yourself?” Uncle Justin asked.

“Ah, ‘there’s the rub.’ I set it up for it to be almost too good to be true. Knowing myself, I would definitely take the offer. Especially since all I had to do was take a pill and then in a few weeks, I’d be a whole new person. That was a fantasy of mine around that age. Take a pill and change your life. If I had known any drug dealers at that time of my life, I might have gone down that path.”

“Okay, so a pill. Why not also send along like lottery numbers or maybe stocks that will do amazingly well in the future to make sure you can be rich.”

“I did leave myself a few notes but nothing like that. I knew if I could just make myself rich without earning it, I would have sat back on my ass eating pizza and other shit all day, every day, and not further myself in any way. No, I didn’t want anything like that. So I gave myself undoctored nanites and programmed them to do what was deemed necessary to improve my younger self’s body and mind. The nanites coursing through my veins right now are heavily redacted to make sure I don’t grow too much, but the versions I sent back in time are a lot more open in their programming to achieve their ultimate goal of making Tim the best version of himself he can become – be that strong, smart or whatever. I’m getting a little bit of an idea of the changes he must have gone through now since I have lost the weight I came here with overnight.”

“What kind of changes are you talking about?”

“I guess the best way to show you how I’m different, is to show you why I’m different.” Tim picked up the ultra-sharp steak knife he had been using on the excellent steak from Uncle Justin’s right-hand man Jose. Tim took in a breath and sat at the edge of his chair looking right at Uncle Justin. “I am a time traveler. I went back in time on a mission to deliver a bit of help to myself in the past. I gave myself an order of nanites to help keep myself from wasting my life as just a security guard to become whatever I could become with a great helping hand.”

Tim opened his left hand and brought the knife across the meat of his palm and slicing into the palm in a practiced, forced stroke. Uncle Justin grabbed the lamp right beside his chair and brought it closer to Tim’s hand to see the hand a little bit better. The blood oozing out of the slice was easy to understand as was the fleshy muscle covered by the skin. Tim used a napkin to wipe away some of the coagulating blood from the middle of his hand taking care to not touch the cut. Uncle Justin then noticed the slice was reducing in size.

“Wait a sec. What is that?” he asked while pointing to the edge of the cut.

After a few moments, the cut was half-closed, and the skin could be seen closing and holding itself together and the cut slowly fading from existence. Tim wiped the excess blood off of his hand and let their host see for himself how he was different than anyone else he had ever met.

“Wait a sec. Um, can you do it again?”

“Sure,” Tim agreed and picked up the knife again.

“No! No! Hang on a sec!” Jensen’s Uncle Justin jumped out of his seat and went to the cabinets underneath the outside kitchen area. He pulled out a large camera, a laptop computer, and several lights. Justin and his man, Jose, brought everything over to a table. “Can y’all come over here and show that to me again?”

He set up the camera on a small tripod. The lights were all shining on the same spot directly under the camera. The laptop was turned on, and Jose unwound a long HDMI cord to connect the computer to the large-screen TV on the wall. “Okay, if you wouldn’t mind, could you show that trick again?” The others, who had already seen the trick in George’s garage, wanted to get their first up-close look at the nanites as they repair the cut once again but this time magnified.

To a man, each one slightly grimaced as the blade sliced into the meat of Tim’s palm and the red gore oozed slowly from the top of the cut and flowed out from under the edge as it moved. It was mesmerizing and vicious at the same time.

Uncle Justin entered some commands into the laptop controlling the camera, and the picture zoomed in by orders of magnification. You could almost make out something working right in front of the cut. It looked like several grains of salt working together to hold the skin and meat together as another stitched the skin together. They were busily melding the two flaps of skin together after another version of nanite underneath the exposed skin worked to weave the sides back together.

“How can this be? We don’t have any technology like this anywhere in the world. I haven’t even heard of anything like this on the drawing board anywhere.” Justin was having trouble convincing himself of what he had just seen.

“The repairs to the hand are complete,” flashed at the bottom of Tim’s line of sight and, after a moment, “End of message.”

“They questioned me for months, worried about how I got in the lab in the first place. I told them how over and over again. I guess they didn’t believe me but, when they discovered my ability to heal, thanks to the nanites, they got very interested in that,” Tim explained.

“We were testing some circuits in the embarkation room when the siren went off, and the door cycled shut. I mean, that was unusual, in and of itself, since there was no power connected to those systems in the first place,” Dr. Thompson, the older of the two scientists recalled. “I’m not ashamed to say I scared shitless when the damned sirens started blaring – barely any other souls in the place, and those sirens were loud.” Dr. Jensen sat back in his seat agreeing with his colleague.

“So, what are you going to do now? I mean, do you try to figure out why you didn’t go home or do you try to figure out how to live your best life here? Maybe your younger self has fully grown, and maybe he understands what happened. Have you ever tried to find yourself in the here and now?” Uncle Justin asked.

“Well, we started searching, but there are a lot of Tim Murphy’s in the United States. We tried to narrow the list down to Tim Murphy’s who should be about the same age. So far nothing has come up, but it is a hard thing to work out.”

Uncle Justin nodded his head in understanding. “I might be able to help that along with a couple of computer friends.”

“I don’t think we should tell anyone else about any of this,” Tim blurted out quickly, his fear showing on his face.

“Okay, I understand. No more people in on the secret.”

The group sat around the fire pit in the middle of the patio, enjoying a few more beers and watching the sunset over the artificial lake in Uncle Justin’s backyard.

“I’m starting to get upset with myself. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before,” Sergeant Thomas exclaimed as he pushed his ‘to go’ order of breakfast tacos off the table and into the trash can. “I can’t believe we didn’t recognize the two girls as the two who run their favorite restaurant.”

“Oh, don’t worry too much about that. I just got this from D.C. This we need to worry about!” Colonel Price said as he handed his subordinate several files in a manila folder. The colonel waited while his right-hand man read through the dossiers. When his sergeant got to the point he recognized as the most important, the colonel continued with the update he was just given from his superiors. “This is turning into something much bigger than a missing prisoner. We may have the beginnings of the most in-depth security snafu in the history of this great country.”

“Well, yes, sir, I’m a little shocked that these ladies actually have backgrounds in the intelligence arena, but their contacts are all used up, and the government they worked for is on the verge of falling apart if I understand the news correctly.” The sergeant left the statement out as a question, but his colonel was seething over the dossiers. “I don’t think there is anything we can do about them having a restaurant essentially on the outskirts of our lab. We still don’t know if they actually know of our existence, here.”