The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  Every time I touched Baker on weekends, I got to know everything he’d been doing during the work week. I got to know all the access codes he knew and everything else he was authorised to know too. I learned everything I needed to know about Violet from Ethel in the same way.

  Would I have married Baker if I didn’t need access to the ‘alien project’ at Area 51? Probably not. I didn’t enjoy being under his control all the time and didn’t appreciate the way he always presumed he knew the answers without bothering to take the time to analyse and identify facts. He was too brutish in appearance for my liking too. His hefty, very masculine build reminded me of many bad men from my past who had done many bad things to me and my relatives simply because they could, and I found it hard to believe he could be any different, especially after he smacked me to keep me in place. I didn’t like how outgoing and chatty he was either, or how he smelled, or the noises he always made by simply breathing.

  I would have preferred a man that was quiet and bookish. A man who didn’t beat his wife. Unfortunately, there was no man like that for me to choose from. Fate made the choice for me, as it had done so many times before.

  I flew downwards, to the edge of the mountain, staying just an inch out of reach of the heat sensors below, to get a better look at the big complex of hangers, factories, warehouses and satellite dishes that made up Area 51.

  In the very middle was the airport Baker and Charlie knew as the ‘Janet Terminal Building’. It had that name because the unmarked aircraft that transported Area 51 employees in and out of the base every Monday and Friday went by the call sign ‘Janet’ and were thus affectionately known as the ‘Janet Airlines’. Behind the Janet Terminal Building was the main operations centre where all security activity was coordinated, behind which military workers like Lynda and May’s husbands often disposed of hazardous chemicals by burning them in large, man-made pits—the toxic smoke of which might have caused their unusual health problems.

  To the right of the terminal building were dormitory buildings where employees lived during the week, and next to it was their mess hall and entertainment facilities like a disco, tennis courts and a bowling alley. To the left of the terminal building were hangers, labs, offices, runways, storage buildings and shelters that the CIA used to develop spy technologies, including the building I needed to get into—the biggest hanger of all, eight storeys tall and over ninety metres in width, looking inconspicuously like all the other brown and white buildings in the area.

  They called it Building 430 and sometimes, Hanger 18, depending on the type of employee talking about it. It had a tiny storage room at the back, with a single locked door blocking access to it, and that room was where I needed to go.

  What stood between me and the room at that point was a desert, a chain link and barbed-wire fence, roaming guards on duty, watch towers containing more guards on duty, heat sensors and a locked door that required both key and an access code to get through. There were stern signs all around the perimeter of the base warning that use of deadly force was authorised within Area 51 too. Any trespasser could be shot, jailed and interrogated for days for simply putting a single foot in.

  A normal human being would have struggled to get past all that without being detected but I was fortunate not to be one. I could fly. At the speed of light too. All I had to do was jump down the mountain, plunge towards Hanger 18 faster than those heat sensors would register, faster than the eye of an average human being could detect, in the fraction of a second, nick an access key from the waist of one of the guards on patrol on the way over and go right to that door I was aiming for.

  Once there, I would have to unlock the punch code lock after unlocking the door with the key but that wouldn’t be a problem either because Baker knew the code and as a result, so did I. All I had to worry about was my speed. I had to consistently move faster than the average human eye could see, without stopping for a breath.

  It would have to be a sprint from the top of the mountain, all the way down, right through that very door.

  I took in a few deep breaths to prepare myself, psyched myself up, ignored the taste of sawdust in my mouth and ran through the whole gamut of possible errors that could happen and how I would react if they did. Then, I—

  —simply got it done. I made the impossible happen.

  Again.

  The tiny storage room was not a storage room at all but a bare-bones shaft with a single ladder in the middle that extended downwards, way past the surface. Following the example of Baker and Charlie and every last one of their colleagues, I put both feet around the edges of the ladder and both hands loosely around its side too and I let gravity drag my body all the way to the bottom.

  There was another door down there, with another punch code lock blocking access to it, and of course, that was hardly a problem for me.

  I punched in the code Baker used, made it in and shut the door behind me before the motion-activated cameras at the very top of the shaft even noticed I had been there. Perks of being able to move at speeds that were in no way normal, I suppose.

  Behind that second door was a long corridor lined with thirty other doors, none of which had any labels on them. There were three security cameras similar to the ones on top of the shaft, placed at both ends and right in the middle. Motion-activated again. Avoidable if you moved faster than the camera designer’s preconceived notions of motion. I sped right to the door on the far left, punched in a third code and went right into the high-tech laboratory I knew was in there.

  It wasn’t my first time being in there. I had been in there once before, a year ago, and there had been a human-sized cage right in the very middle, which made me taste faecal matter whenever I looked at it. This time however, the cage was gone and in its place was a single tubular tank full of a pink jello-like substance that was attached to what looked to me like a life support system connected to computers the size of cars.

  There was a naked humanoid being floating in the middle of the tank, with multiple tubes connected to her spine. She was not an alien but human, tiny in contrast to the height of the tank, with her thick, dark brown hair floating upwards like Medusa’s venomous snakes. Although her eyes were closed, her mouth was open which made her look as if she were about to say something.

  I could tell she wasn’t going to say a word because I wasn’t hearing anything when looking at her. That meant she was not conscious. Put to sleep by the sedative chemicals the life support system was pumping into her once every minute along with glucose and oxygen. I knew that before I got there, actually. Baker had been the one who had proposed she be put to sleep a year ago. He spoke then as if he truly believed she had been responsible for Violet’s horrible death but I couldn’t say for sure if he was because I couldn’t read past thoughts.

  I went to the control panel on the car-sized machine running the life support system and switched all chemicals off.

  Exactly thirty seconds after I did so, the eyelids of that slim, naked human female began to twitch. Three seconds later, they were open, revealing large eyes with angry dark brown pupils that looked rather brown in the pinkness of the goo. Those eyes made me hear the sound of drumbeats as they panicked and scanned the room in fear while the rest of the body connected to them struggled to come to terms with its sudden lack of oxygen. The eyes stopped scanning the room when they caught sight of me.

  “Hey, Hella,” I heard a familiar voice say in my head. “So nice to see you trying to kill me again. I thought tomorrow would be the day I’d get murdered and ripped apart but how nice of you to try to drown me before that. Thanks!”

  I pressed the code to activate the drainage of the goo from the tank and waited for it to fizzle and slowly drain away from the naked human female’s face and body. In the meantime, I replied, in my head, for it was way more convenient than talking with my mouth, “Weren’t you sedated all this time? How is it you know what’s going on?”

  The naked female kicked about viole
ntly, coughed out pink goo and gasped frantically as she took in huge breaths of air after the level of goo in the tank sank past her face, down to her neck, but the voice in my ears continued, rude and sarcastic as it had always been. “I don’t know. Since when have I ever been able to give you answers to science shit like this? My brain didn’t sleep with my body, just because! And you don’t get to ask me questions because you got me into this, you crazy bitch!”

  “I had to be sure you didn’t kill her, Lilly,” I said in my head as I went to the computer system that controlled the lock on the top of the tubular tank and worked on feeding it the code that would unlock it.

  “Yeah, you couldn’t just believe me when I said I didn’t, could you?”

  “No, I couldn’t. I watched you lie all my life. I know how good you are at it. It’s not my fault I can’t trust you.”

  The top of the tank slid open and made the naked female gasp even louder in relief as fresh air began gushing in.

  I flew into the tank, disconnected the tubes connected to her and dragged her out and away from the goo that was now only at the level of her calves.

  She was as light as I remembered her to be and only slightly larger than Gigi was. She sputtered again the second I dropped her on the floor and remained there, still gasping for air, curled up like a slimy, naked new born baby.

  “Wanda did it!” she said with her mouth, the second she could. She looked up at me, her face covered in globs of pink goo, while her wet shoulder-length hair clung onto its sides. “I heard her, just one week after you came to see me, and I saw it in her mind. She’s running some pharmaceutical defence agency with her son now and got herself hired by the CIA the moment she found out I was in here! It was she who knocked me out and removed me from the cage while Violet was getting killed and she who got them all thinking I’m a murderous Russian spy! If you had come back for me I could have told you about it but you didn’t, did you? You chose to let me get punished for a while, figure it out on your own, and use the opportunity to try out marriage like a normal person because, why not? Right? Why not! It’s just my life here. No biggie!”

  I was back at the computer that controlled the top of the tank by that time, trying to get it closed because I knew an alarm would go off if I left it open for longer than five minutes. “Like I said,” I said, while punching in programming codes with my index fingers, one letter at a time. “I was sick of being manipulated by you. Plus, I wanted to know what they thought of us, if they would be able to figure out how we’re different. I have every right to assess situations and choose my own modes of action. Besides, I’m getting you out now, aren’t I? I met Wanda too, for God’s sake. Scared the bejesus out of me, if you must know.”

  “You owe me! Had I not told you to get plastic surgery she would have recognised you and killed the hell out of you before you had any chance to assess your God damn situation!”

  “Yes. I am aware.” I got the top of the tank to close but it was a second too late. The alarms had already gone off and were starting to blare like the sirens of a fire truck. I was reminded then why I didn’t like to be interacted with when trying to get work done. All that colour and music distracted me and made me slow. “Damn. Time to go! Use your speed this time! Don’t let the heat detectors get you again!”

  I flew towards her at the speed of light, pulled her up by her soggy armpits and dragged her towards the door by the wrist. It didn’t bother me that she wasn’t wearing any clothes. I had seen her naked many times before so it was nothing quite out of the ordinary for me.

  “My date wanted me to slow down so she could see Area 51 better,” she said in my head as I flung open the door and dragged her out into the corridor with many doors. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “I expect you not to date women with husbands who work for the CIA and not to get yourself caught floating in mid-air!” I replied, also with my head. “How is that too much to ask?”

  “I really did love her, if you must know. And if I ever see Wanda again, I am so going to kill her!”

  I rolled my eyes, tired of seeing yet another person pine for that oh-so-lovely Violet who hadn’t really done anything to deserve all that care, in my opinion. “You’ll find someone else within a day. I know you will. Now come on! Move it!”

  I got her to the door I had come in from, right as it slammed open and let in a rush of armed soldiers in bulletproof gear. I pulled us both into a meeting room behind one of the unmarked doors and kept us out of sight till they dashed towards the laboratory we had only just exited. After the footsteps ceased, I dragged Lilly out of the room at the speed of light, out to the shaft I had come down from and flew us all the way to the very top.

  Once outside, we dashed past the four guards guarding the very first door I had entered from without them even noticing how close we had been to them. They each had the latest rifles in hand and the most reliable bulletproof vests in the world on but not one of them could see or feel us go.

  Lilly was still dripping pink goo everywhere when I grabbed her and pulled us both into the air faster than any of the CIA’s spy planes had been able to fly. Within a minute, we were miles up in the air, so far away from the stream of armed soldiers running towards Hanger 18 below, they looked, to us, no different from ants.

  I brought Lilly up to that nameless mountain Ethel introduced me to and retrieved the knapsack I’d left hidden behind a bush to get out the clothes I’d prepared for her. In it was one of my new leisure suits, a bland-coloured and shapeless one I knew she would never be wearing if she had the luxury of choice, and a wig too, a blonde one styled in a curly bob that would make Aimee, Fern and Blue laugh if they ever saw her wearing it.

  Lilly was all shades of murky green splotches when she saw them. She threatened revenge as she shivered and did her best to shake the last bits of pink goo off herself. She was still pretty then, ingénue-like as she had always been, only a tad damp.

  “You don’t have a choice, my dear,” I said when she was almost done buttoning the last of the buttons on the suit up with a face as black as thunder. I personally found the outfit rather unattractive too, even though it’d been labelled as the ‘Hottest new look in town!’ in the store I bought it from. “You can’t risk looking like you. Not when Wanda’s out to get you.”

  Lilly frowned and opened her mouth to say something unkind, I suspect, but someone else beat her to it.

  “You both think about me a lot, I see,” that person said, in perfect German.

  Lilly turned right away and I dropped the wig I had been holding when I turned too.

  Behind us, amidst sagebrush and Joshua trees was—

  Weslyn Jaeger. Or Wanda, as Lilly and I used to call her. Her champagne blonde hair was silver under the moonlit sky and her lips were so red and shiny, they looked artificial. Almost plastic. The whole time in La Paz, she hardly smiled but she was certainly smiling now. Smiling while emitting a plume of blood-red smoke out the top of her head and making me hear gunshots.

  “I’m doing very well,” she continued. “If you must know. I have technology now, to locate you when you don’t want to be found, and new friends who give me lots of help and money.”

  Neither Lilly nor I waited to hear more. We jumped off the mountain and flew as far away from her as we could get but she—

  —followed us. Jumped off the mountain and flew as quickly as we were doing, if not faster.

  I was tired from all the sprinting I had done to get inside Area 51 and out while Lilly was weak because she hadn’t used her muscles in an entire year. Neither of us could outfly the woman who was powered by gunshots and blood-red smoke, nor could we keep out of reach of the two animal restraining poles with nooses at the end that she had in each hand and kept trying to swing towards us.

  “I think about you a lot too, you know,” she said, when her nooses caught us both in the necks and dragged us down onto the dusty desert floor with an impact that sent air shooting out of my l
ungs. “Both of you. You have no idea how many sleepless nights I’ve spent just thinking about you.”

  A handgun floated out from behind her back like an object possessed and flew up to the middle of Lilly’s forehead all by itself.

  Weslyn, or Wanda, smiled when she saw it there. “I’m so glad I found you. You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this day to come.”

  The handgun cocked itself.

  Chapter 34

  4 August 1975, Monday

  “I thought you said you’d always love me,” Lilly said in German, in a careful, polite voice that was not at all like her usual one. Her person and clothes were completely white now, as if a bucket of white pain had landed all over her. She was clearly afraid, no longer her usual cocky self. For the first time in all the years I’d known her, she looked genuinely tiny in her 1.63m tall frame.

  “I changed my mind,” Wanda said, also in German.

  In that instant, the trigger on the handgun floating right in front of Lilly’s face moved backwards all by itself.

  Five loud booms. Five gunshots. One inside my ears, four outside.

  No! I jumped forward at the speed of light to try to push Lilly away from the line of bullets but Wanda moved just as quickly, pulled the pole connected to the animal restraining noose I had around my neck backwards and kept me from getting near Lilly until four bullets pierced through the skin of her forehead, her skull, and, at last, her brain.

  The whiteness over Lilly glimmered, became blinding for a few seconds, then faded, became muted and eventually went entirely away. By the time Lilly was normal-coloured again, her eyes were wide open but blank, as if all emotion had gone out of her.