A/N1 Chapters will lengthen after this. This is the last of the 'scene-setting' chapters. Warning: Comic-book creepy coming…
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Don't own Chuck.
Too Old For This
CHAPTER FOUR
Greylag Gulag
Chuck heard birdsong. Or he thought he did. Or he thought he thought he did. He was unsure, even of being unsure.
Something...was happening...to him. It seemed a little like waking up; it seemed a little like sobering up; it seemed a little like being born. It was as if a moment before he had been a mere body, untroubled by a mind, and then slowly, ever so slowly, like raindrops off a roof an hour after a shower, sentience returned, concreteness, retention, continuity...the whole concrete, retentive, continuous system of minded life, it came back to him, and he was gradually himself again.
Birdsong. Yes, he did hear birdsong. Then the sound of fluttering, troubled wings, flight in an escape, a change in the song, less musical, more urgent. The birds had been frightened. Chuck was frightened too.
He was on his back. He sat up, causing deep, roiling waves of heavy pain beneath his forehead. He had the headache all other headaches envied. He grabbed his own head and squeezed, trying to force the pain back, to somehow minimize it. He failed. He fell back on the...cot. He closed his eyes.
He went back to being asleep, or to being drunk, or to being unborn. He heard nothing. But before he slipped entirely into that strange unbeing, he felt something crawl across his chest.
ooOoo
Sarah was in her bed. She was not asleep. She did not expect to sleep. Chuck was gone. Her bed was empty. She stared at the ceiling, trying to stay calm enough to rest, even if she couldn't sleep. The scent of Chuck enveloped her; she had put on one of his shirts. It helped a little. She thought about the afternoon, her conversation by phone with Beckman. And then later with Ellie.
"Sarah?"
"Yes, General. Do you have any news, anything to tell me?" She made sure the barb was audible in the final clause of her question.
"Sarah, we need to talk." Sarah winced, unused to hearing her phrase to Chuck aimed at her.
"Ok, General. Rider is napping. Let's talk. But before you start, let me tell you what Rider found." She told the General about the spider poem, read it to her. She thought she heard Beckman choke up at the end. "Do you have any idea why Chuck would communicate with us in such a bizarre way, General?" Barbed, again.
Beckman was silent for a moment, perhaps composing herself after the poem, perhaps composing her answer. But then she spoke: "I do have an idea. But you aren't going to be happy when I tell you."
Sarah had braced herself for something like this, so she was able to keep her rising fury under some control. "Please...just tell me."
"First, your poem is not the only indirect communique Chuck left behind, Sarah. The team from Bozeman found a drawing on a table in the safe house. A drawing in the dust. It was a drawing of a spider, and underneath it, the single name, 'Freddy'. Does that mean anything to you?"
"Freddy?" Sarah felt lost. Then it hit her. Chuck had told her long ago that Wheelwright looked and sounded like that movie-monster, Freddy...Freddy Kroger...No, Freddy Krueger.
"Freddy Krueger. Chuck told me several times that Wheelwright looked like Freddy Krueger. So...it was Wheelwright."
"That is what we are now thinking. One of the Bozeman team members came up with Krueger. I guess this...Freddy turned into a spider in a movie?" Sarah confessed she wasn't sure. She'd never watched any Freddy movies, even though Chuck had asked a couple of times. She had no desire then to remember Wheelwright. She hated that she had to remember him now. She found him deeply creepy. The thought of him having Chuck made her skin crawl, absolutely crawl.
"So, what else do you have to tell me, General?" Sarah allowed her tone to be openly demanding. Beckman was technically no longer her boss.
"Sarah, there's something you don't know, something Chuck didn't want you to know, a secret. We kept it because we thought it could do no harm but now I am sure we were wrong about that. Chuck still has...an Intersect."
Sarah saw red but made herself direct the anger, mold it. "He has...an Intersect? Not...the Intersect?"
"Well…," Beckman stretched the syllable out, "it sort of depends on how you count…."
"General!"
She could feel Beckman stiffen all the way up the line. "Sarah, when Ellie and her team were extracting the last Intersect Chuck downloaded, he told her something that caused...complications. Evidently, when Chuck was a boy, he downloaded an early version of the Intersect, downloaded it in his father's study. He's had the Intersect...an Intersect...for most of his life. Ellie was able to remove the last Intersect Chuck downloaded, but she was," Beckman paused and cleared her throat, "afraid to remove the first one."
Sarah trembled, involuntarily. "Afraid? Why, General, why afraid?"
"Because it was so deeply implicated in, so completely integrated with his mind, with him. She said that the first Intersect was so deeply part of Chuck that it hardly made sense to think of it as a part at all. She was afraid that if she removed it, she might remove Chuck too, so to speak, damage or lose the man in the attempt to undo what the boy had done."
Sarah's mind was Ferris-wheeling. She was angry; she was frightened; she was confused. "Why am I only finding out about this now?"
Beckman was quiet for a moment. "Because Chuck asked us not to tell you. Ellie believed that the first Intersect could no longer cause flashes and posed no threat, physical or psychological, to Chuck. Chuck didn't want you to know for reasons that I never completely understood. You'll have to talk to Ellie about that. But, given that Ellie thought it would cause Chuck no harm, I went along with both leaving it in him and leaving it a secret.
"I now think, I now know I made a mistake. Anyway, for what it is now worth, Sarah, I am sorry." She paused.
"I just got two pieces of information. That's why I delayed calling you. I needed to do some follow-up. First, the pizza circulars were encoded, specifically for an Intersect. We think it was encoded for the one he still has. We are unsure what the encoding does, but it is likely commands of some kind, a way of taking control of the Intersect, and so of the person who has it.
"Second, a drone I sent to Langley to dig around turned up a copy of the complete list of files dumped at the CIA black site Wheelwright was at. She found it in misfiled in a folder...well, nevermind. It doesn't matter. The list only has one thing of interest beyond what we already knew. There were three files there labeled 'Orion'." Sarah caught her breath. "I don't know what was in them, but Wheelwright had to have figured out that Chuck still had an Intersect somehow...I'm guessing those files are a crucial part of the story."
Sarah chewed on the inside of her lip, thinking. Chuck had downloaded the Intersect all those years ago? Bryce's emailed Intersect was not Chuck's first brush with it after all. Maybe the early exposure explained why Chuck did so much better with the later versions than anyone else did? Or maybe that he survived the early version meant that he really was just that Intersect apt, made for it, as it were. She shook her head.
"Alright, General. I'm going to talk to Ellie and tell her about all this. And she is going to tell me all about this new, I mean, new-to-me Intersect."
"I will get in touch if I learn anything new. We are currently investigating all the flights into and out of Bozeman."
Sarah hung up. She wanted to curse at Beckman and she wanted to grab something and throw it. Why would Chuck have kept this from her?
But as she asked herself the question, she had an inkling of the answer. Chuck had always been afraid that she would not love him without the Intersect. Quinn had pushed those buttons, for example, in that Buy More, years ago, telling Chuck he would never have had Sarah if not for the Intersect. She thought she had gotten him past that insecurity, but maybe she hadn't. Maybe she hadn't because all this time she'd been with him, in love and happy, thinking that the Intersect was gone, it hadn't been gone. Chuck had it before she met him and he still had it after she thought he no longer did. Maybe he was still worried that he couldn't really keep her if he let go of the Intersect.
She dialed Ellie's number. As she waited for an answer, she picked up Rider's phone. She had officially confiscated it. She at least needed to know what was on it. She started scrolling through the contacts when Ellie answered.
ooOoo
"Chuuu-uuck! Oh, Chuu-uuck!" Lilting, the voice. Lilting.
Not birdsong. A human voice. Human-ish. Not birdsong but singsong.
"Breathe deep, Chuck. Breathe deeeep." Chuck could feel his throat burning. His headache, Mother of All Headaches, stormed back. "Breathe deep, Chuck, enjoy the Revoltium…Inhale, enjoy..."
Revoltium? Chuck laughed. He tried to laugh. But that made him cough. And that made his throat burn more intensely, an old pine conflagrating in a forest fire. He finally opened his eyes. Just a slit. He was on the cot. Behind bars.
A large spider was sitting on his chest...wait, did spiders sit? Miss Muffet's did, right? Sat down beside her? The spider on his chest was just...sitting there. A weird fog seemed partly to fill the room, wispy and circulating, like the legs of a giant, gaseous spider, or like a mobile spider's web. Spidery, everything...spidery.
"Go back to sleep, Chuuu-uuck. Back to sleepy-bye-bye. You'll wake up a new man. Goodnight, Chuuu-uuck..."
Chuck lost the singsong voice. He lost everything. At least until he began to dream of spiders. And Freddy Krueger.
And a long, slow-spinning spiral down into an abyss.
ooOoo
"Ellie?"
"Sarah." Ellie's tone made it clear she'd been expecting the call. Beckman must have told her that the cat was not only out of the bag, it was on the table.
"So, Ellie. Secrets? Intersect secrets? Really? From me? Your brother's wife. Your sister." Her clipped phrases rose in pitch and volume. "Why, Ellie?"
She heard Ellie huff, and she knew her sister-in-law, her friend, was huffing at herself, not at Sarah. "I'm really sorry, Sarah. I didn't think we were keeping anything from you that would ever matter, and I hated to fight with Chuck about this, and we...we went a few rounds about it, believe me. Your husband, my brother…" Ellie's exasperation was evident.
"Sarah...How do I explain this?...Luckily, you know him and love him, so that will help. Chuck lives in perpetual fear of losing you, and now of losing Rider too. It's not that he lacks faith in you, Sarah. It's just that after everything with Mom and Dad…" She huffed again, clearly not happy with this start on an explanation.
"When Chuck downloaded that primitive version of the Intersect, Dad told him he was special. Dad didn't mean he was special because he downloaded the Intersect, he meant that he was just...special. But that line has gotten stuck in Chuck's head, and reinforced by all that happened with Team B. He thinks that to whatever extent he is special, it is the Intersect's doing. And he thinks that all the good things in his life ultimately trace back to that inadvertent download when he was a boy. It's like computer-aided Imposter's Syndrome. Chuck's always been humble, generous-minded, willing to put others, the ones he loves especially, ahead of himself. But sometimes his humility becomes...self-abasement. Of course, you know this better than anyone…"
Sarah nodded, then realized Ellie couldn't see her. "Yes, I just thought we'd gotten past all that. What do I have to do to make him understand, once and for all, that I...well, how I feel about him? I feel that way about him, not some feature of his, and certainly not the damn Intersect!" Sarah hated herself a little, just then. All these years, and although she could think the thought that she loved Chuck, and did, every day, often, she still stammered at the point of saying it aloud, still. She could do it, and she did, but...Anyway, she knew that didn't help with Chuck's insecurity, even if he understood. And he did. She knew he did.
Ellie's voice dropped, became placating. "Sarah, I think...most of the time…he knows. But he's never gotten over thinking you are a really big deal. If you stop and think about it, that's incredibly sweet, especially after all this time. He never takes you for granted. You know, when we visit, or you do, I always think about how Chuck looks at you when you don't know he's looking, and about how much I want to keep looking at Devon that way: as if my heart was ready to burst with love…"
Sarah felt tears. "I know. I know how much he loves me. I...I...well, you know, Ellie, ditto for me."
"I know, Sarah." There was a long hush on the line. Ellie was giving Sarah a moment.
"So, tell me about this early, this 'primitive' Intersect, Ellie? What is it and what is it doing to Chuck?"
"Well, first, Sarah, please tell me what's happened, as you understand it. Give me details where you can."
Sarah started with the arrival of the mail early the evening before and ended with the dead spiders. She told Ellie about the poem and the note in the dust. When she finished the narration, she stopped. "What do you make of it, Ellie?"
ooOoo
Chuck had no idea what time it was, where he was, who he was. All he knew was terror and horror. Scenes of past terrors and horrors. His parents, gone. Shaw with Sarah in Paris. His dad, dead. Sarah in Russia. Sarah in ice after the Norseman. Sarah leaving him standing by the fountain, gone in search of a life he thought they might never find again.
And then the scenes became possible terrors and horrors. Rider, still-born. Sarah, dead in childbirth. Car wrecks, boating accidents, falls from cliffs, chokings...
And always in the background, even the background of the remembered terrors and horrors, there were spiders, sitting, wrapped in swirling grey vapor, staring at him with their unfeeling congress of eyes.
And then they were upon him, biting him, preparing to make a meal of him, not viciously, but sacramentally. Flesh of their...flesh. And Rider became a spider, and Sarah became a spider, and they, thus transmogrified, they beckoned him to become one of them, join them...and how could he refuse?...He loved them. He went and he was slowly, carefully, wrapped in silken threads, threads of still more terrors, still more horrors.
The scenes became incommunicable, the terror and horror too profound for words, only groans could reach nearly deep enough. His mind and his spirit raged, his teeth gnashed; he was stranded in an outer darkness, a darkness even the darkness feared. India ink paled beside it. And then he collapsed, the rafters of his mind giving way, ghosts dropping.
And then all he could see were spider eyes reflecting his own back at him.
ooOoo
Ellie listened to what Sarah told her with very few interruptions. When Sarah finished, she heard Ellie sort of hum to herself, thinking.
"Look, Sarah, I can only guess. I really never saw any Dad's specs for the primitive Intersect. I've, well, reverse-engineered them, but I'm not sure. I'm thinking that this crazy man, this Wheelwright, must have gotten information from Dad's notes. Used it to figure out a way to control the Intersect, then sent out the flyers and waited. He couldn't be sure Chuck still had it, but he could be sure that if Chuck did, the circulars would affect it, mostly sure, anyway.
"But here's the thing. That Intersect is deep in Chuck. It can affect him but he's...coped...with it, even for a long time without knowing it. I'm not sure Wheelwright can use it to simply control Chuck like an automaton. It would be more like...I don't know, hypnotic suggestion. Chuck could, would fight it. I'm guessing he was able to control himself enough to leave the poem and to draw in the dust of the safe house. Of course, that's with the effect of the flyers...I don't…"
"You don't know what Wheelwright might be able to do to Chuck or make Chuck do once Wheelwright actually has Chuck, right?"
"Right. Beckman's sent me all the info on this...Revoltium? Where do these people come up with these names? But I haven't had a chance to do much tinkering or thinking yet. And I have no idea what kind of computer hardware or software Wheelwright might bring to bear…"
Ellie fell into a worried silence; Sarah was already there. Ellie went on after a moment. "But, Sarah, you know that Chuck is...well, he's like a kid, rubbery. He's a lot harder to beat than the bad guys expect."
Sarah smiled a small smile. "Yes, Ellie, he is. There's a fighter in that lover." The smile was present in her voice.
"I'll be up late working on this, Sarah. Call me if you need to talk. But I'm going to get back to it now."
"Ok, Ellie, thanks."
Sarah put her phone down and picked Rider's back up. She slipped it into her pocket and went to his room. She stood over him. Her boy. Hers and Chuck's. The two of them physically made one. She reached out to touch Rider's brown curls and she saw his eyes open.
"You should go to sleep, sweetie. We'll find your dad. But you need your rest if you are going to help."
He nodded and gestured for her to lean down. He kissed her cheek softly. "I love you, Mom."
She looked into his blue eyes. "I love you too, Rider. You know that, don't you? I know I could say it more, but…"
He gave her a gentle look, a grin. "I know, Mom. I always know. But it is nice to hear it."
"You know how much I love your dad too, right?"
"I know, Mom. And so does he. But he needs to hear it more than me, I guess." The little guy grinned again. "Dad's kinda gooey inside, you know."
Sarah laughed. "I do know. I've known almost since I first met him, Rider. Now, go to sleep, ok?"
He closed his eyes and then said, "Ok. Going to sleep."
Sarah left Rider's room, leaving his door partially open. She went to her room, found a worn shirt of Chuck's and slipped into it, sighing softly to herself.
ooOoo
She did eventually sleep, a few hours. In the gray dawn, she saw her bedroom ceiling redden, go gray, then redden again, then go gray. She had put Rider's phone on her nightstand when she took it out of her pocket before getting into bed. She saw that a notification light was flashing. She swiped the screen and it glowed responsively.
A map came up, with a pin stuck in it. Next to the pin was a dialogue box. It said, simply, "Find Dad here."
A/N2 That Chuck, huh? Since some of you have guessed, let me say it: this is a Halloween Story. I expect to finish it before the holiday, but still…
Tune in next time for Chapter 5, "Post Modern Prometheus". The preliminaries are now out of the way.
No telling when Chapter 5 will be ready though. Back in the classroom early tomorrow.
