Disclaimer: I do not own Criminal Minds.
Chapter 10
Government Center T Station
October 16, 2010
Before commencing his Physical Education class, Reid consumed three hot dogs, four Twinkies, and a bottle of blue Gatorade. He tried not to doze off as he waited for Pete radio him back about the software. The wait gave him a chance to digest the junk food. He had been hungry enough to eat more, but he didn't want all that food jiggling around in his stomach while he jumped up and down over the floor.
"We're ready for you," Pete said through the radio.
"Alright, I'll be starting in a minute," Reid rolled out of the driver's seat, yawning and blinking. "If you need to talk to me, just yell through the radio. I've got it set to receive, so I won't be talking back. The door between the driver's compartment and the passenger car is open. I'll be able to hear you if you yell."
"Got it," Pete answered. "Uh...Sorry about all this. I really am sorry. We wouldn't ask you to do this if we had any other choice. The software requires reports from localized sensors on the running rails. Thank God the ones near Government Center are still working. I'm sorry, Doc...Our subway system is the oldest in the country, and we've always been slow to upgrade..."
"Except when upgrading reliable software into spastic pieces-of-shit," Mike contributed from a distant corner of a distant room.
"Don't worry about it, Pete," Reid reassured the engineer. "I'm sure I'll survive a little exercise. Exercise is good for you, isn't it? Or so I've been told. Plus, I have all kinds of snacks ready to go...Twinkies, Ho-Ho's, Pringles, Gatorade..." he ticked off his snack collection as he exited the driver's compartment.
In the passenger car, Reid positioned his feet over the floor between the entrance ramps. He tested the floor with a small hop. It was one thing to jump up and down for a few minutes to power up the dashboard. It was quite another to jump up and down indefinitely to stop a UFO cult from activating the nuclear button.
Reid felt silly jumping up and down, like a five-year-old in the midst of a temper tantrum. The vision amused him. He imagined himself as an angry five-year-old on a mission. His mission was to jump up and down in frenzied fury until his parents let him have Twinkies and Ho-Ho's for dinner. The fully realized mission sent a wave of energy surging through him. It was the boundless energy of the child, and Reid plucked it out of the air before it could bounce away. Despite his exhaustion, it gave him the strength to begin. Someone like Reid, who had never quite let go of the child, was perfectly positioned to use it.
"Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!" Reid jumped over the floor.
"I'm tired," the body declared.
"Shut up," the mind replied.
"OK," the body muttered.
"Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!" Reid jumped some more.
"Nothing yet!" Pete yelled through the radio, "We're up to 800 volts on the third rail!"
Reid didn't reply. He couldn't reply. The radio button was located on the dashboard in the driver's compartment, and he couldn't abandon his battle station in the passenger car. He resisted the temptation to stop jumping.
"Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!"
"Still nothing!" Pete yelled, "825 volts!"
Reid didn't reply. He couldn't reply. He was too out-of-breath to say anything. He started sweating. Drops of perspiration rolled down his forehead into his eyes. Reid launched a preemptive strike. Before the sweating became profuse, he removed his button-down shirt and threw it across the car. He intended the shirt to land on a row of seats near the door. It landed on the filthy floor instead.
"I want to stop," the body announced.
"No," the mind replied.
"Fine," the body grumbled.
"Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!"
After awhile, sweating was no longer an issue. Reid sweated profusely, but he let the sweat roll down his skin, according to the laws of gravity, until his skin was wholly drenched in sweat. Sweating became the New Normal. Overheating became the New Issue.
In the warm subway tunnel, on a stationary train, air did not circulate, and sweat did not blow away. There was no breeze through the window and no power for air-conditioning. Reid had no choice but to remove his pants. Overheating always started in the legs. Legs were full of skeletal muscle, and skeletal muscle generated a lot of heat as it churned. Legs were not adequate heat exchangers. The skin of legs did not carry a sufficient number of sweat glands to cool off the muscles within. The muscles burned like a furnace. They were as hot as the boiler room of the Titanic before the doomed ship sank into the icy Atlantic.
Reid kicked off his shoes. He unbuckled his belt and let his pants drop to the floor. He hopped out of them while hopping over the floor in a Pavlovian daze. Using his left arm, he threw his pants across the car to join his shirt on the filthy floor. This time, he hit his mark. He discovered that while he had always written with his right hand, he was a southpaw when he threw. No wonder he had always been so bad at baseball. As a child, his father had coached him in Little League, and he had always been the most inept player on the team, both as a pitcher and as a hitter. Now, he realized that he had simply been using the wrong side of his body. Perhaps he could have been a good player if he had used his left side instead. Everything might have been different if he had used his left side.
"Who am I kidding?" Reid snapped back to reality.
He stopped jumping and sat himself upon the floor. It took him thirty seconds to slip his shoes over his feet and a full minute to tie the shoelaces in his shaking fingers. In total, Reid stopped jumping for ninety seconds. Even with a thumping heart, burning lungs, and seizing muscles to accompany them, those ninety seconds were pure bliss.
"We got something!" Pete yelled, "We're stuck at 850 volts! The meter hasn't budged in several minutes. Keep going, Dr. Reid!"
"Yeah, Doc!" Mike shouted. "Keep going! You're doing it! Those cult freaks can take their third rail and shove it up their asses!"
"Thank you," the mind telepathed towards the radio, "Thank you for your encouragement."
"Don't stop," the body concurred.
At this stage, sweating and overheating were both part of the New Normal. Breathing was the New Issue. Reid knew that he was not in shape for prolonged periods of cardiovascular exercise. In a society in which 60% of the members were overweight, skinniness was often mistaken for fitness. In this case, the correlation was false. Reid had always been skinny, but he had never been fit.
As he breathed, a burning sensation spread from his lungs into his sinuses. His lungs longed for air, but each breath of air carried a cost. The cost was pain. Air scraped against the nasal passages on its way into the windpipe. Air forced its way through the windpipe, squeezing the passage open and shut, alternating between exploding and imploding states of discomfort. The lungs, which one did not sense until there was something wrong with them, clutched at the air, but regretted their hunger as soon as the air inflated them. The lungs screamed for air, knowing full well that air carried with it a special brand of burning agony. Burning in the lungs synchronized with burning in the muscles. Eventually, mercy prevailed. Numbness creeped in to replace burning. Reid felt his legs from a distance, as pieces of wood vaguely attached to his body. Numb pieces of wood did not hit the floor with the same force as fresh limbs. They failed to generate the requisite amount of current.
"Damn it!" Pete's voice came through the radio. "Why is the voltage going up again? We're up to 900 volts all of a sudden! Dr. Reid? Are you OK?"
"Keep going, Doc!" Mike shouted. "Please keep going!" his voice took on a tone of desperation. "Damn these overhead lines! They're not charging up fast enough!"
"Don't let it get to 1,000...Don't let it get to 1,000..." Reid could hear Pete even as Pete muttered to himself.
The voices prompted Reid to jump harder. Movement was the only thing that mattered. Movement was life. More than anything, Reid wanted to stop, but stopping carried a cost as well. The cost was death. Reid considered himself lucky. His state of living or dying was under his own control. When it came time for death, self-inflicted torture was not the worst way to go.
"925...We're stable at 925 volts," Pete reported.
Reid nodded involuntarily. He tried to smile, but found that smiling diverted too much energy from jumping. He patted himself on the back in a mental gesture. He had hit the wall, but he had survived the impact. He had survived long enough for the endorphins to kick in. Endorphins appeared when the body had used up all its energy reserves. Their job was to push the body past its physical limits, regardless of the consequences. Under the influence of endorphins, the mind exulted in the movement of the body. Thought processes became simple. Voices in the mind became monosyllabic. There was not enough energy for complexity.
"Move, move, move..." the mind repeated, "Move, move, move..."
Reid's heartrate reached 200 beats per minute. That was beyond the healthy threshold for a 29-year-old man. It didn't matter. For the moment, the high was firmly in charge. The high held back the current. The situation was ridiculous. One man's workout high protected a teeming metropolis. Unfortunately, as all junkies knew, highs never lasted.
At 212 beats per minute, the high gave out. Reid felt himself failing. He felt failure from a distance. His mind screamed that it was not so, but his body had its limits. He felt increasingly dizzy and nauseous.
"I have to stop," the body said.
"Stop...No, don't stop..." the mind waffled.
"Sorry," the body murmured.
At 222 beats per minute, the body crumpled to the floor. It waited for the onset of sudden cardiac death. It watched its heartbeat through its skin. On skinny people, heartbeats were often visible on the surface of the chest. It was never a pretty sight, not at 60 bpm and certainly not at 222 bpm.
Reid wondered if his brainbeats were visible on the surface of his forehead. His brain was beating almost as fast as his heart. It threatened to pound its way out of his skull. Even so, he was still a super-genius with an IQ of 187. His mind still functioned.
"Have a snack," the mind reminded the body, "And a drink. During strenuous exercise, hydration is key..."
"Good idea," the body agreed.
Reid reached towards a pile of snacks on a seat, grabbing a random bounty of Little Debbie and a random bottle of artificially-colored liquid. Lying down, less bile crawled its way up his throat, so he felt much less nauseous. He enjoyed a little snack while staring at the spinning ceiling. He had either reached a new low or a new high. It cost too much energy to distinguish between the two.
"Dr. Reid?" Pete yelled desperately. "Are you OK? We're up to 950 volts!"
"Dr. Reid!" Mike yelled with him. "Please don't give up! You have to keep going! You're the only thing standing in the way of those cult freaks. No one has heard from Agent Morgan since he disappeared into the feeder station. The overhead lines aren't working. You're the only thing we have!"
"Please stop talking," Reid telepathed through a chocolatey mouthful of Ho-Ho's. "Of course I'm OK. I just need to take a little breather. Two more minutes...Two more minutes is all I need. No one ever died from exercise. No one except Pheidippides, the first runner of the marathon...He dropped dead right after delivering his message to Athens. Sometimes, young people die from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy during exercise. That's a congenital defect of the heart...I'm sure I don't have that...I hope I don't have that..."
The complex train of thought energized Reid. Multisyllabic thoughts indicated that the body was recovering. It was ready for another round.
True to his word, Reid got up after two more minutes. He could still see his heartbeat through his skin, but the amplitude was not much higher than usual. The exploding feeling was gone, as was the pounding of the brain. He still wanted to throw up, but not everything could be perfect.
The mission was not over. The five-year-old had not finished showing who was boss. Mommy and Daddy had allowed him Ho-Ho's for dinner, but he wanted Twinkies too.
Reid started jumping up and down over the floor again. After ninety minutes of continuous operation and a five-minute break, Plan B swung back into action. The burden had not fallen entirely upon Plan A.
North Station T Station
October 16, 2010
Morgan sensed something wrong the minute he heard voices through the radio in the feeder station.
"Damn it!" Pete's voice came through the radio. "Why is the voltage going up again? We're up to 900 volts all of a sudden! Dr. Reid? Are you OK?"
"Keep going, Doc!" Mike shouted. "Please keep going!" his voice took on a tone of desperation. "Damn these overhead lines! They're not charging up fast enough!"
"Don't let it get to 1,000...Don't let it get to 1,000..." Morgan could hear Pete even as he muttered to himself.
The voices carried confusion and fear. The words did not match up with Reid driving a train on the third rail, diverting current from the detonator.
"Why wouldn't Reid be OK?" Morgan wondered. "Why doesn't he radio back? Why does everyone sound so desperate?"
Occam's Razor drew the obvious conclusion. Something had gone wrong with Plan B. The burden had fallen entirely upon Plan A.
Plan A had gone wrong as well. Plan A had not believed that Plan B would fail. If it had, then it would never have veered onto its present course. It would have taken a more aggressive course, and it would not have been alone. It would have turned the drab little room into a bloodbath of cult members. Now, the opportunity was lost, and both plans were trapped in the worst of both worlds. Plan B was failing, had failed, or was about to fail, and Plan A followed a course that depended upon the success of Plan B. In battle, a double-pronged approach was best, but only as long as the prongs were not hopelessly intertwined.
Morgan sighed inaudibly and decided to get on with it. It was what it was.
"I'd like to learn more about your beliefs," Morgan faced Charles Preston.
"Really?" Preston raised his thick brown eyebrows, "Wouldn't you rather have us stop?"
"Would you stop if I asked?" Morgan asked.
"Of course not," Preston replied. "We're almost up to 1,000 volts. The detonator goes off at 1,000 volts. We like nice round numbers."
"You've got another 100 volts to go," Morgan pointed out the obvious. "In the meantime, why don't you tell me more about your organization?"
"Vicki?" Preston turned towards the young blonde woman who had opened the door.
"Our organization is none of your business," Vicki said. "We're not interested in sharing our beliefs, and we're not interested in recruiting new members. That would be pointless at this stage," she snickered.
"Then why did you let me in?" Morgan asked.
"We wanted to see the look on your face when the bombs went off," Vicki replied.
"The bomb," Morgan countered.
"The bombs," Preston corrected him, "Alpha and Beta, at Park Street and Government Center."
"Which is which?" Morgan asked.
"Alpha is the one at Park Street," Preston replied, "Beta is the one we're detonating from here."
"Alpha is dead," Morgan said emotionlessly. "It's been dead for awhile. Your friend, James, over-indulged in conventional explosives on the Red Line. The explosions took out the third rail near Downtown Crossing."
At the unexpected news, Preston flinched, Vicki stared, and four other heads perked up from computer screens all around the room. Morgan coughed to cover up a smirk.
"James left multiple anonymous tips for the FBI," he continued. "I guess he was having second thoughts, or attacks of conscience, or an existential crisis. I wouldn't know...I'm not good at reading people that I've never met. You know him much better than I do."
"He wouldn't!" Preston looked to Vicki.
"He would," Vicki replied grimly. "I should never have let him out of my sight. I should've gone with him to South Station. I thought of him as a technical genius, not as a fragile inexperienced little kid," she referred to a man not much younger than herself.
"Yeah," Morgan agreed, "You should've slapped a leash on him while you had the chance. People like James Robert Leonard are really the scum of the Earth. You think you know him. You think you trust him. He does everything right until you hand him an important job. Then, he turns around and screws you over. He's single-handedly screwed up the whole plan. If it hadn't been for him, there wouldn't have been any FBI agents in the subway system, screwing around with the third rail. You would've been able to detonate your devices by now."
"FBI agents?" Preston turned to Vicki, "There's more than one of them? I thought there was only one guy jumping up and down on that Green Line train. We only heard one guy talking through the radio."
"Believe it or not, that idiot is still doing it," a frustrated voice reported from the far side of the room. "This piece-of-shit software won't let us send additional current through the third rail. We're stuck at 925 volts."
Morgan coughed again, this time to clear a lump of panic from his throat. The words didn't make sense. He didn't know why Reid was be jumping up and down in a train on the Green Line. He didn't have complete information, so he couldn't fathom an explanation. All he knew was that Reid was still diverting current from the detonator, and that was the only thing that mattered.
"Don't worry," Morgan reassured Preston, "There's only one agent in the subway system. His name is Dr. Spencer Reid, and he's diverting current from the detonator."
"We know what he's doing, Agent Morgan," Vicki smirked, "Let's see how long he can keep at it."
"We still have Beta," Preston reassured the other cult members. "We'd rather have both devices in place, but Beta is good enough on its own."
"No, it's not!" Vicki snapped. "Beta is too small! It was always the smaller one. Alpha was the important one. I warned you about James. You shouldn't have trusted him. You should've let me go with him. But no...You thought he was the big old brain who could handle everything on his own."
"I'm sorry, Vicki," Preston held out his hands helplessly. "Can we not argue about this right now? There's nothing we can do about James, but we still have Beta ready to go. We're still on track. Only 75 volts to go. We'll make it. That guy on the train can't go on forever."
"We'd better make it," Vicki snarled under her breath.
She turned her back on Preston and collapsed sullenly into a chair. She slammed her feet angrily upon a desk and lit a cigarette.
Morgan digested the exchange. He had learned a lot in the past few minutes. By all appearances, Vicki was the de facto leader of the cult. Whenever she spoke, the cult members looked at her face. Whenever she moved, the cult members followed her motions. Charles Preston did not command their attention the way Vicki did. Morgan guessed that Preston was merely Mr. Moneybags.
In battle, it was best to attack the leader. Morgan resisted the temptation. His strategy was not based on attack and counterattack, at least not yet. At this stage of the operation, his strategy was based on empathy, so he turned towards Charles Preston.
"You're right," Morgan said to Preston, "You still have Beta. To be honest, I'm quite impressed with your work. I'm a bomb expert and an expert in obsessional crimes, so your work is right up my alley. I'd like to learn more about your motives."
"Our motives are simple," Preston answered calmly, "We wish to escape."
"Escape from what?" Morgan asked.
"From the world," Preston replied, "From humans and humanity. Humanity is old and tired and dirty. And humans? Don't even get me started on humans. What a collection of ugly, stupid, worthless scraps of garbage we've all become."
"What about yourself?" Morgan asked carefully, "Are you including yourself in that description?"
"Of course," Preston said, "Of course I'm including myself. I'm no better than any other human. I'm just as ugly, stupid, and worthless as every other scrap of garbage on this planet."
"I agree with you," Morgan said, "Both about humanity and humans. Humanity - old and tired and dirty...What a perfect description! And humans - ugly, stupid, worthless. I see that everyday in my line of work."
"You're a very pessimistic man, Agent Morgan," Preston remarked. "You're not what I expected from an FBI agent."
"When you understand people as well as I do, you draw the most obvious conclusions about them," Morgan explained. "When you see what I see, it's easy to get a little down on the entire human species. I agree with you about everything. Even about yourself - just as ugly, stupid, and worthless as all the rest of us. You, me, Reid, Vicki...We're all garbage."
"Well...I..." Preston failed to hide his agitation.
Morgan failed to hide his disdain. Charles Preston was such an easy target. He was so easily agitated. Morgan didn't even have to raise his hackles. All he had to do was agree.
Morgan held the upper hand, because he understood human behavior. All he had to do was listen and agree. All he had to do was show empathy. Except that he was doing it in the nasty manner in which one showed empathy to oneself, not in the kind manner in which one showed empathy to others. He spoke to Preston in the voice that Preston used to speak to himself. No one enjoyed hearing one's own voice emanating from someone else's mouth. Morgan agreed with Preston, and Preston disagreed with Morgan. It was a defensive mechanism. Surely, Charles Preston was not the ugliest, stupidest, most worthless human in the old, tired, dirty human species. There was still Vicki.
"Ugh," Vicki sighed in disgust. "I don't want to hear anymore of your needy self-loathing, Charlie. I've been listening to it for years, and I'm sick and tired of it. Can we please just detonate this thing already?" she asked the other cult members.
"We're getting close," said a paunchy man in his early-40s. "Another 75 volts...Come on, you idiot, stop jumping, drop dead...Let us have our voltage..."
"Actually, I'm more interested in what happens next," Vicki said, "What happens after the explosion. "Let me tell you what it's going to be like, Agent Morgan. It's going to be like a honeycomb. A honeycomb hanging in space, like a galactic supercluster, hundreds of millions of light years across. Everyone, human or non-human, will be there. We'll all have our own little cubbyholes in the honeycomb. We'll all meet up there. We'll visit each other and learn about each other. It's going to be a collection of the best - the best of our kind and the best of everyone else's kind."
"I thought humans were ugly, stupid, and worthless," said Morgan.
"Most are," Vicki replied. "I don't consider myself one of them, no matter what he says," she jerked her thumb at Preston. "I'm better than most. We all have our own reasons for escape, and mine don't coincide with anyone else's."
"For me, it's all about release," Preston joined in. "I want to escape, and I don't care who or what is waiting for me on the other side. I just want to escape. I want to go out with a bang rather than a whimper. It saddens me that the universe is going to end in the Big Chill. I'd prefer the Big Crunch. The Big Crunch matches up so well with the Big Bang."
"Explosive in birth and death?" Morgan asked.
"Yes," Preston agreed, "Explosive release!"
Morgan swallowed nervously at Preston's words. They bothered him even more than Vicki's strange honeycomb visions. He was officially in over his head. Preston was a suicidal manic-depressive seeking blissful release in a thermonuclear explosion. Preston a depressed version of Adrian Bale. Vicki was phenonmenon unto herself. She was a deluded narcissist seeking bizarre communion with extraterrestrials in an imaginary celestial afterlife. Morgan wondered about the other cult members. The CP1919 cult appeared to be a hodge-podge of psychiatric disorders. Morgan didn't think that he could battle multiple disoders at once. Perhaps he could find a way to pit them against each other.
"950 volts!" said an elderly woman from the nearest computer screen. "We shot up 25 volts in three minutes!"
"Yes!" Vicki grinned in excitement, "I knew that idiot would lose it sooner or later. Did he really think that he'd be able to jump up and down forever?"
"Dr. Reid?" Pete yelled desperately. "Are you OK? We're up to 950 volts!"
"Dr. Reid!" Mike yelled with him. "Please don't give up! You have to keep going! You're the only thing standing in the way of those cult freaks. No one has heard from Agent Morgan since he disappeared into the feeder station. The overhead lines aren't working. You're the only thing we have!"
The voices carried fear untinged by confusion. Morgan gave in to panic. He breathed faster and faster. Reason deserted him, and his mind raced, searchng for salvation in every nook and cranny.
Plan B was failing. It had done its job for as long as it could, but its nature had always doomed it to failure. Plan A operated alone, under the assumption that Plan B had failed. The two plans, A and B, had gone the way of the two devices, Alpha and Beta. Alpha was dead, and so was B. Morgan had A, and the cult had Beta. Morgan held the upper hand. As with brain and brawn, B was not the equal of A, Beta was not the equal of Alpha, and neither were Beta and A equals.
As Albert Einstein once said, "Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
Next up: Reid's life continues to suck. Morgan becomes Gideon, so his life sucks as well. Vicki dies in a grease fire. - Well, not really, but she'll get her comeuppance. :)