Extracted - Chapter 2 – Accidently On Purpose

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 2 – Accidently On Purpose

 

(Five Years Later)

 

“Henry Marsh!”

Doctor Judith Rameriz looked up at her best friend and lover, Doctor Benjamin Folley.  “What?”

“The answer to your problem,” Ben replied.

“Marsh?” Judith asked.  “Marsh is my problem!”

“Yes.  But what if we could also make him your solution?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your idea.”

“What idea?”

“To use the soul capture system for revenge.”

Judith looked at him for a few moments, then sighed.  “Yeah, I’d really love to get back at that ass.”

“So do it.  We’ve been talking about doing another experiment with the system anyway.”

“Yeah but…”  She stared at him again for a moment before she said, “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Just like you yourself said.  Marsh took your son and threw him in prison where he doesn’t belong, and he’s not letting him go.”

“Despite the fact that Josh is innocent!” Judith threw out.

“Exactly!” Ben agreed.

“But all I said,” Judith reminded him, “was that I’d like to take his son away from him and lock him away where he couldn’t see him anymore, just like I can’t see my son.  Revenge!”

“That’s not all you suggested,” Ben reminded her.

Judith considered that.  “Yeah.  I did say it would be fun to take his son and switch his soul with someone else so that Marsh got back something he wouldn’t be expecting.”

“And that he would probably never figure out,” Ben added.

Judith nodded reluctantly.  “True,” she agreed.  She held her hand up.  “And yes, before you say anything else, it would serve that sanctimonious asshole right.  We all know Josh is innocent.  There was no credible evidence at all that tied him to that murder, but Marsh still managed to get him declared guilty and sent away for the next fifty years!”  Her anger flared.  “I want to murder him so bad!” she shouted.

“Hence…” Ben said softly.

Judith considered it for a moment.  “Hence, we somehow kidnap his son, remove his soul, and replace it with someone else.  And then I guess, give his son back to him…or give back whoever, or whatever, that person…or thing…winds up being.”

“At the worst, as far as everything we know, his son would wind up in a coma.”

Judith nodded.  “Yeah.  His son would be there…but not there.”  She considered that again.  “Like Josh.  He’s there, but not so that anyone can really see and talk to him easily.  There, but not there.”

Ben nodded.  “You wanted to look for an experiment.”

“Yeah, but to duplicate what happened to Hector first.  One subject.  Pull his soul, then put it back again.  With lots of testing!”

“We can test,” Ben told her.  “All you want.”

“But what you’re suggesting, we wouldn’t be doing it to just one person, we would be doing it twice, to two different people.  And worse, we’d be trying to put each soul we collect, back into the wrong bodies!  What kind of disaster would that bring?  It could kill them!”

Ben shrugged.  “Maybe.  But most likely not.  Not from what data we were able to collect.”

“What little of it there was,” Judith reminded him.

“True,” Ben conceded.  “But still, the possibility is there.  For both the scientific study, and…”  He stopped, waiting for her to catch up.

“Revenge,” she finally said.  “Yeah, I seem to remember that Marsh has a son, and he’d probably make an excellent candidate for the experiment.”

“Not to mention, it’s all about getting revenge on him as well.”

“Yeah, of course,” Judith agreed.  “But who would be the second candidate?”

Ben shook his head.  “That of course, would be the bigger problem.”

The two of them spent the rest of the day discussing it.  Who would be a good candidate for the second person.  And more importantly, what type of person would be the best to swap with Marsh’s son.  Again and again, in order to get back at Marsh for what he had done, they discussed the best type of person to abduct.  Kidnapping a city gang member, a criminal mind, was high on their list.  It would be the perfect revenge solution for the overly righteous asshole that Marsh was.

It wasn’t until after dinner that Ben suddenly came up with a different solution.  One that might even be better.  “I know!” Ben suddenly said.

“Know what?”

“Who the second candidate should be?”

“Who?”

“Congressman Michael Stiller’s daughter.”

“Stiller?  He did everything possible to try and get the government to stop our water system from being approved and sold.”

“And in the end, we proved that there wasn’t one single thing wrong with it,” Ben reminded her.  “But he was still our biggest obstacle to getting it on the market.  And look where we are now.”

“A lot richer than even we expected,” Judith admitted.  “And yeah, Stiller was a real asshole in trying to get everything launched.”

“So…” Ben said.

Judith considered it again.  “Congressman Stiller has a daughter?” she asked.  “I didn’t know.”

“I think he has two,” Ben told her.  “I think one would probably be in her teens now, and the other a few years younger.”

“And how old do you think Marsh’s son is?  From the one time I saw him with his family, I would guess he was in high school somewhere,” Judith said.

“Ben nodded.  “I’d guess a junior or senior by now.  I’m not sure.  But if we’re going to go the kidnapping route, then we kidnap Marsh’s son and Stiller’s older daughter, and then make the switch.  Their ages would be similar enough.”

Judith considered that, but another possibility came to her.  “Or…” she said.  “We kidnap Marsh’s son, and Stiller’s younger daughter.”

“The young one?”

Judith nodded.  “Wouldn’t that make a more drastic statement for Marsh?”

Ben nodded.  “Probably.  If anything happens to them at all.”

“True,” Judith conceded.

Judith and Ben discussed it for several days before finally deciding to explore going ahead with the plan.  The biggest discussion revolved around whether they should bring in the rest of the original team to help them.  The team working on the water system had been expanded now, but the original members were the only ones who knew what had happened to Hector, and they all wanted to keep it that way.

While the new, larger team worked on improving the water system, trying now to make it smaller so it could more easily be used for villages where not as much water was needed, the original members now met twice a month to discuss what they should do about the soul extraction problem.  The original machine that had extracted Hector’s soul now resided in the basement of Judith’s new mansion.

The only original member who was no longer with the team was Hector himself.  After the process left him in a coma, his family argued against him working on it anymore.  The team still awarded him his share of the money they now brought in for the process, but Hector had quietly retired.  He was never told what happened to his soul.  He only knew that the wave generator had malfunctioned, and it put him in a coma for three months.

The biggest item on the original team’s discussion list now was if they should bring in a new member to their team to aid in their scientific testing for the soul extraction.  They all knew that having a medical doctor or at least a psychiatrist on the team, or both, would be a good idea, but the problem was, like with everything else about the project, did they dare let anyone else know?  The situation was simply that sensitive.

As to Judith and Ben’s plan for revenge however, in the end, Judith and Ben both agreed that they didn’t dare tell anyone else on the team what they were planning on doing.  Ben decided they would have to hire someone to kidnap both subjects for them, then he and Judith would handle the soul exchange themselves.  Then those same men could return the kidnapped kids to where they could be easily found.

One further development they decided to add was the addition of a ransom demand for the return of Marsh’s son.  If Marsh got Josh out of prison and had him declared innocent of the crime like he really was, they would do nothing but return Marsh’s son safely back to him…unharmed.  In the back of their minds, both Judith and Ben really hoped that Marsh would give in and free Josh, and none of what they planned on doing would take place.  But if not….  Neither of them knew what would happen when they tried it.  They could only hope.

Finding information on the kids they planned on kidnapping was easy.  Philadelphia’s District Attorney Henry Marsh had only one child, a son named Stephen who was seventeen years old and would be entering his senior year of high school.  U.S. Congressman Michael Stiller had two daughters, Emily who was sixteen, and Nancy who was only twelve and going into the seventh grade.  Finding that information was the only easy thing that Judith and Ben needed to do.

It took Ben almost a month to find someone who was willing to kidnap both kids for them, and he had to go into New York to find them.  It was going to cost Judith a lot of money, but because of their water system, money was no object.  After another two weeks of planning, they were ready.

 

--- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

 

They were professionals.  Not just criminals, but mercenaries who had spent a good part of their lives in the military.  Now the kind of jobs they hired themselves out for were a different kind of dangerous, and often illegal.  As long as it paid well, they didn’t care.

In the dead of the night, outside of Philadelphia, one of the three men picked the lock on the back door to Henry Marsh’s house and all three of them entered silently.  They had already disabled everything they could, so they weren’t overly worried about alarms.  With guns drawn and ready, they crept through the kitchen and found the stairs.  Silently they went up.  Henry Marsh’s son’s room was easy to locate since it had a large sticker pasted on the outside showing a rock band.  The door to his room was unlocked like they expected.  Still making no sound, they opened the door and went inside.  Stephen Marsh was asleep, as he should be.  In moments, there was no chance of him waking any time soon.  A hand was placed over his mouth to stifle any kind of scream, and a needle was plunged into his neck containing a drug that left him sound asleep for the foreseeable future.

With one man keeping his gun out in case of trouble, the other two carried Stephen’s large muscular body out of his room and down the stairs.  In moments they were out of the house and soon had him loaded into the back of a van.  They drove him to the specified pickup location where they transferred Stephen’s sleeping body into the back seat of a car.  Ben paid them the first installment and wished the men good night.

Ben drove back to Judith’s mansion where he and Judith struggled to get Stephen safely down to her basement where the water treatment system/soul extractor was located.  Stephen was put into a small room where his wrist was chained to the wall.  The chain was hopefully unneeded since they planned on keeping him asleep for the duration.

With that much done, Judith and Ben retired to her bedroom for some much-needed rest.

The next morning, Ben made a phone call, and the ransom note for Stephen went out to a server in the Bahamas, where it was then sent on to Philadelphia District Attorney Michael Marsh in the form of a simple email.  The note explained that his son Stephen would be returned in good shape if Joshua Rameriz, one of the founding members of the Planetary Eco Alliance group, was released from prison in the next two days and all charges against him were dropped.  To all appearances, the email looked like it might have been the work of the activist group that Josh did indeed belong to and that was responsible for a number of ecological scandals around the world.  Nothing in it tied it to Judith or Ben in any way.

That night, the abduction process was repeated.  This time, outside of New York City.  Several hours later, the mercenaries delivered U.S. Congressman Stiller’s twelve-year-old daughter Nancy into Judith and Ben’s clutches.  Nancy’s drugged and unconscious body was placed in the same basement room and chained to the wall where Stephen was.

Judith herself made sure that Stephen received injections every few hours to keep him unconscious.  Once Nancy was delivered into her care as well, she made sure that Nancy received the same drug to keep her asleep.

For the next two days, Judith and Ben studied the news.  They also had no choice but to talk with some police detectives who considered that they might have kidnapped Stephen since Josh Rameriz mentioned in the ransom demand was Judith’s son.  The police had no proof that Judith and Ben had done anything at all, so they were soon left alone, especially since it looked like the activist group was the real responsible party.  Nobody talked to them about Nancy at all.  Why would they?  Nancy’s abduction was a New York problem and had nothing at all to do with Philadelphia.

While they waited, hoping that Judith’s son would be released from prison, both Judith and Ben did as much of a thorough physical examination on both Stephen and Nancy as they could.  Both of them wished that they had gone ahead and brought a medical doctor into their special soul extraction team, but at the same time, they both knew that because what they were doing was so illegal, they could never dare tell anyone else.  Judith and Ben made very sure however that the drugs to keep both subjects unconscious were administered regularly to make sure neither of them ever woke up.

After two days, when it looked like Josh was going to remain in prison, the decision to move forward with their experiment was made.  Ben and Judith were both in complete agreement that they should do it.

Seventeen year old Stephen Marsh was placed naked into the water/soul extraction machine first.  His unconscious body was laid down in the final chamber and when everything was double checked and ready, the machine was turned on.  It took only seconds before Judith herself switched the machine off, but by that time, just as it had done with Hector, the machine indicated that something was in the small extraction canister, despite the fact that once again, there was no mass and nothing at all for the spectrometer to read.

Stephen’s comatose body was dragged from the machine and Nancy’s smaller body was placed into it.  A new collection canister was put into place, and the process was repeated.  They had now captured not just one human soul, but two.

Feeling the monstrous weight of what they were about to do, the canister containing Nancy’s soul was removed from the machine and the one containing Stephen’s soul was put in its place.  It took only minutes for them to reverse the magnetic field.  When all was ready, Judith looked to Ben and softly said, “Here goes.”

As before, when they had done it with Hector, only five seconds elapsed between the time that Judith switched the machine on and when she turned it off.  When they pulled Nancy’s body from the machine, they both heard her let out a small moan of distress before she lapsed once again into complete unconsciousness.  Judith and Ben looked at each other, then continued removing Nancy’s body.  They took it all the way back to the room where they had been keeping her and chained her to the wall again.

When they were done, they put Stephen back into the machine and put the canister containing Nancy’s soul in place.  As before, the machine was only on for five seconds before it was turned off.  Stephen’s body made no sound at all as they dragged it from the machine back to the room where they chained it to the wall.  The fact that Stephen had made no type of sound was something that neither Judith nor Ben commented on, but it concerned each of them.

For the next day, Judith religiously kept the drugs going into both Nancy and Stephen to keep them unconscious.  Neither she nor Ben knew what was going to happen with the switched souls.  They only knew for sure that both subjects were alive.  The drugs made it impossible to know if they were in any kind of coma as Hector had been.

Would Nancy and Stephen remain in deathlike comas for the rest of their lives?  Or would they both awaken as Hector had done and be perfectly fine?  Or, the thing both Judith and Ben were the most interested in learning, would either subject show any changes because of the swapped souls?  And if so, what would those changes be?

Only time, and waiting, and watching from a distance would give them any kind of clues as to what would happen.

 

--- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

 

That night, the mercenaries were back.  In a secluded meeting place, they collected the unconscious bodies of both Stephen and Nancy.

An hour later, Stephen’s unconscious body was found outside of a Philadelphia restaurant, still in the same pajamas he had worn to bed when he had been abducted.

It wasn’t until several hours later that Nancy’s body was found outside of a New York restaurant.

There was no security video of the return of either child.  Nobody had seen anything at all.  Both Stephen and Nancy were picked up by ambulances and transported to hospitals, but they were hospitals in two different cities and no connection between the abductions was made.

The next day, Judith and Ben watched carefully, but the return of both abducted kids barely made the news at all.  The only thing Judith and Ben learned was that as they expected, both Nancy and Stephen had been found unconscious, and that both kids were still unconscious when they reached the hospitals.  But then with all the drugs they had kept them on, it was going to be some time yet before either of those kids was going to wake up.

The only question was, what would those kids wake up to?  That is, if they woke up at all.