Under Lock and Key: The Zone

By Robin Geesman

As the U.S. teeters on the brink of economic collapse, the harshness of reality rushes in at a hostile pace.

Marchessa and her father are severed from the experimental program that woke Marchessa from her comatose state of being, a choice they were forced to make to stop them from imprisoning Spencer for a crime he didnt commit.

In the meantime, the grip of government experimentation grows stronger, kept hidden from concern and public scrutiny, secure under lock and key.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491747582

Robin Geesman

Robin Geesman, previously a Respiratory Therapist, moved from California to Louisiana with her sons, and began a writing career; her son’s encouraging her along the way. She still lives in Louisiana today, enjoying the storms that offer their menace as a backdrop while she writes stories of madness and cutting-edge progress. This is the second book in the Under Lock and Key trilogy.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014, 2015 Robin Geesman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4759-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4758-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918713

iUniverse rev. date: 02/06/2015

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Acknowledgements

My thanks goes to Todd Vorencamp for his excellent photo inserts on pages 172 and 225. Your work is amazing!

I would like to thank my children for believing in me and my enemies for giving me plenty of material to work with.

I would like to thank Gertrude and Bruce Campbell for their support in my writing endeavors. Without them I would have never found the time to write and would have never survived my writing environment.

I would like to thank my favorite meteorologist, Dorrell Winninger with KALB News Channel 5, for selflessly allowing me to promote my books on his sites. Keep sending the dark and brooding storms my way!

I send my heart felt appreciation to Rhonda Martin for her collaboration. She knows how to smooth the rough with uncanny precision.

And none of this would be possible without my team from iUniverse and everyone who helped open the doors to publishing. It was such an icebreaker I hear a considerable chunk of the arctic shelf is completely gone! Though I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

And to all my friends and fans and followers who have made the forward motion of this project so incredibly fun ~ thank you for loving what I am doing! It has allowed me to do what I love.

May there be more to come!

Now

On with the chaos!

Prologue

Each one of the Under Lock and Key books is designed to be read in singular fashion. However, each Under Lock and Key book leads to the next with the final story explaining the first as the first story led to the last creating a closed circuit. For now, you are in the center of that circuit, where the impulses and influences of turmoil expose those who have chosen what paradigms to embrace as they move forward and cross over the undulating lines to join what sides they’ve subconsciously chosen. Which lines are crossed remain to be seen and might very well surprise you as you steel yourself in to discover what it is that remains forbidden to public knowledge and hidden safely Under Lock and Key.

Chapter 1

M archessa’s life took an unexpected turn for the worse one night as she was viciously attacked on her way home after an altercation she’d had with her fiancé, Spencer Hawkins.

The fight with Spencer happened in front of all her friends at a bar she considered to be her secret little hole in the wall where she hung out and chilled out after work. He’d gone home in a huff after their squabble while she stayed behind with her friends.

Later that night she’d decided to walk home instead of accepting a ride from one of her friends. She’d wanted to clear her head before she went home. She thought the walk would do her good. She put her jacket on and left her friends to their wonderful gossip and clinking of drink glasses with each grand announcement of someone else’s troubles, and their statements that always followed about why their troubles didn’t make things the end of the world. It was a little game they played to keep their spirits up and troubles in their proper perspective.

It was chillier outside than Chess expected it to be. But she’d figured it wouldn’t take long to get the blood moving in her veins with a brisk walk home. She would warm up in no time at all.

The streets were practically deserted. Everyone or, most everyone was settled in their allotted homes already. And that was fine with Chess. It simply meant that she didn’t have to do the polite nod and smile as much as she made her way through the deserted streets of town to Spencer and his bad mood waiting for her at home.

The sounds of the night seemed more amplified with the people missing from the doorways and corners to muffle the echoes of Chessa’s movements. It was eerie and interesting all wrapped up into one neat little bundle of curiosity.

Then she heard a can clanking across the ground somewhere up ahead of her. She couldn’t tell its origins, but she straightened her shoulders and prepared for her routine nod and smile. She kept walking, passing a couple of corners and nooks as she went, but no sign of any company to be had. She figured it was probably a cat or something that knocked the can over pouncing on a rat or whatever cats find out here in the alleyways.

WHAP!

Suddenly Marchessa was hit by something as she came to the edge of the brick building. It hit her in the chest hard enough to knock the breath right out of her. She stumbled against the wall from the blow of it, gasping for breath.

A man stepped from around the corner. He was big and his hair was tangled. He had a wooden bat in his hands.

Marchessa couldn’t catch her breath.

WHAP!

He moved in so fast with the bat she barely saw it coming. She turned her head, she tried to duck …duck out of the way of the oncoming bat. But it hit her in the side of the face. He made contact with her cheekbone and she’d felt it shatter. She heard the bone snap and splinter and felt the reverberation of the impact throughout her skull. The pain was white hot as she went down to her knees.

Give me all your money, Bitch, The man hissed.

She couldn’t believe this was happening to her. She looked up at him. It took a tremendous amount of effort. She was shaking and her head wouldn’t stay steady. He grimaced at her, exposing jeweled front teeth. And the smell, he smelled awful, like old sex that had gone sour. She wanted to vomit.

He put the fat end of the bat to the curve of her neck and used it to push her the rest of the way to the ground.

I said give me your money, Bitch! He growled as she lay there on the cold pavement, her body trembling as he held tight to the hand grip of the bat that was still wedged in the crux of her neck.

She had a strange thought that the jeweled teeth in his head were worth more than any money he’d find nestled in her wallet. It didn’t fit together.

There was the sound of people in the distance. He looked over his shoulder and back down at Marchessa.

She could see the frustration in his face. He was going to run. She could see it in him. She wanted him to run. At least then it would be over, done with. She didn’t care if he got away. She just wanted him gone. But then she saw him lift the bat. He held it almost like a golf club. She knew what was coming and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. She closed her eyes.

WHAP!

The last thing Marchessa heard was the sound of her skull being split open with a baseball bat.

She lay there unconscious, unaware of the people who had rushed to her aid and protected her until help could arrive.

She’d gone into a coma after the attack. And Spencer became the prime suspect because of their fight. It looked bad considering the circumstances despite his claims of innocence.

Her father, Greg Hewitt, was later approached in the hospital Marchessa had been sent to about placing her in an experimental program meant for the advancement of medical procedures for comatose patients. He agreed. And it turned out that the simulation was a wonderful new leap in medicine that had miraculous effects on the outcome of comatose patients and it had probably saved Chessa’s life. But it hadn’t occurred to Marchessa’s father before getting them involved in government funded explorative medical experimentation, that there could be unforeseen complications to having knowledge of such curiosities. But there are. And those complications arose in Marchessa’s life after she awoke within the simulation as the truth came out about Spencer’s innocence of the crime he’d been convicted of and put in prison for, the attempted murder of his fiancé, Marchessa Hewitt. It came out while she was still plugged into the program and it complicated their lives from that point on as those in charge tried to cover the evidence of their participation in this government run classified medical simulation experiment, new technology that was classified due to the risk to National Security.

The Hewitts paid a heavy price for insisting on getting Spencer out of prison. Chessa and her father were severed from the program, released and incorporated back into society with the proper documentation of a woman waking from a coma inside a regular public hospital, having the revelation of her fiancé paying the price for what the mugger had done. It was close enough to the truth that the Hewitts could follow the game plan with minimal coaching, and this protected the program from public scrutiny. But that was the only part of it Greg allowed Chessa to know. His daughter didn’t need to know the disturbing details of what he’d endured at the hands of those who wanted to control the outcome of these events. It was burden enough for him to carry the dead weight of the unspeakable methods they used to manipulate him that he had the unfortunate circumstances of encountering.

Marchessa was the prime force in getting Spencer released from prison, not that he should have ever been in prison.

She went to the police with her story. Please, you’ve got to listen to me, she said.

They wouldn’t even take her back to an office or desk to discuss the situation. They’d sent two uniformed police officers out to the lobby to take her statement and they were treating her like she was taking up too much of their time over nothing.

You’ve got the wrong person in prison for this crime. Do you understand? she tried to explained to them. I’m the victim of the crime. I’m the one this happened to. I was in a coma. I couldn’t testify. But I’m telling you now you’ve got the wrong guy.

They didn’t want to listen. They weren’t even taking notes. They just looked at each other with exasperated expressions.

One of them said to her, We’ll look into it and get back to you.

But before Marchessa could even open her mouth to speak they’d already turned around and walked away, leaving her sitting there in the lobby. And they couldn’t get back to her. They were too busy treating her like a nut to bother taking down her information.

They were blocking her attempts to correct the matter because the police had placed Spencer in their cross hairs from the beginning and hadn’t cross checked their own accuracy. What they’d wanted was a closed case. And it hadn’t looked like Marchessa was going to survive the attack. So they’d taken the easy road to convict and close the Hewitt case. It had nothing to do with quality law enforcement. Everyone was so over worked, being so busy crawling up the ass of the American people, that quality was an afterthought, something used during media involvement, or the cases that allowed them the right to raid, pillage, or in some other way profit from the crime in question. In this case the family was too tethered by the government run medical program to discover the charade before Spencer Hawkins had been imprisoned, and by then it was too late.

Now the police were refusing to cooperate and re-open the case.

But the government was keeping watch on the Hewitts. They wanted them to succeed. Success equaled an end to the drama that threatened to expose the delicate nature of the program. And so, Dr. Rhymer from the lab quietly supplied the Hewitts with a high ranking lawyer capable of presenting the evidence without exposing the information about how the discovery had been made concerning Spencer’s innocence.

And soon Marchessa was again in police headquarters, this time being presented with screen upon screen of computer mug shots. Her lawyer remained present during the viewing. He already knew who the mugger was because of his connections with the lab. But he needed to dumb down their approach to meet with societal standards. The technology he and Marchessa were using to distinguish the identity of her attacker hadn’t been cleared for public knowledge.

He brought with him, tucked away in his briefcase, a secure device that contained a digital photo of the classified memory event to assure the accuracy of the conviction this time. And as Marchessa narrowed down the appropriate mug shot of her attacker, her lawyer discretely matched it to the memory event that was on file at the lab, which cleared them to move forward.

The courts eventually arrested and convicted the mugger. His fingerprints had been on the bat that had been used to bludgeon Chessa with the whole time. He’d already had an extensive record of violent acts against women. And finally, Spencer was released from prison, no apologies made to Spencer Hawkins for their unjust incrimination of him.

After that, Marchessa, her Dad, and Spencer moved half way across the United States in an attempt to remove themselves from an environment steeped in betrayal and manipulation. Her father wanted an environment he knew hadn’t been digitally mapped, one that wasn’t virtual as it had been during the simulation Marchessa’d been plugged into. He also wanted them out of reach of the ever building storms and disasters that kept taking down the rest of America one neighborhood at a time. He figured they’d been through enough. And he’d done his research. Though the town they moved to ended up being an emotionally toxic, corrupt, festering cesspool of a town. Not an improvement by any means of measurement and maybe a half dozen steps backwards. But they paid cash for the house they bought. Real estate’s cheap in dead end towns like this. Though it was a cute little cottage. And the move became a kind of safety zone for them to regroup, somewhere in the grey zone of temporary and permanent.

The floors of their new home were mostly polished wood. The windows were French pained, some of them stained glass. There was a sunroom towards the back. There were two bedrooms down the hall.

Marchessa took the one to the left that faced the front and side of the house. Her dad took the one at the end of the hall that took up the side and back corner. Spencer stayed with Chessa. It was kind of uncomfortable at first, staying in the same room, with her father in the room next to them. She hadn’t done that before. But things were different now. It would work itself out.

Sometimes Marchessa wondered if they’d done the right thing, leaving the town she grew up in. She loved that town. She liked the smell of it, the feel of it. She liked the way it was laid out, North to South, East to West, it was easy. She liked the fact that it was centralized to everything worth visiting around it, the pine filled mountains and their tranquil lakes, the wine country, the opera houses in the coastal cities, and the ocean with its waves crashing and rolling forever. She liked the culture and the people. They were friendly, intelligent, and accepting of others. That was probably the most important thing that made it so special there. But she liked the weather too. It was never too cold, or too humid, or too windy. And only for one or two months out of the year it was too hot. And it was then that she went to the lakes every chance she got to swim and kayak and sometimes hike. She liked the memories of her life lived so well there that nothing else but life mattered. She’d been so happy. But things really were different now.

They had to leave to break the cycle of events that were quickly becoming too overwhelming for any of them to handle. Her father was afraid it was only going to get worse. He knew he was in over his head. And this was the only way he knew to level the playing field.

It’s okay, Dad, Chessa would tell him when he’d apologize again and again for the things he didn’t know how to handle, for the things she loved that he had to take her away from. She understood. He was doing his best and that’s what she loved about him. He always tried and he only ever erred on the side of protecting his family. If they could only understand how honorable that was, maybe they wouldn’t have severed them from the program and they wouldn’t have had to leave their beautiful home, and their friends, and everything familiar that mattered. But as things deteriorated in the rest of the nation she worried less about it. She knew it was their trust in each other that made them able to stand strong against anything coming their way. Whatever happened, Marchessa knew that was the difference between love and infatuation. And there was no room for error right now. All of their lives were complicated by the very simulation she’d been plugged into at the government’s expense. Nothing was the same anymore. They weren’t even supposed to leave like they did. The government thought they owned her because of the computer chip in her head, placed there by the United States run government laboratory when she’d been a part of their experimental procedure while in a comatose state of being. The chip wasn’t something they could remove without killing her and she had no desire to die. The lab personnel had still been deciding what to do about her when she left with her Dad and Spence, thinking for some reason that it was actually possible to leave a situation like that.

But regardless of the fact that they’d been severed from the program, regardless that no one was supposed to know of their connections to the lab or the procedures going on behind its locked doors, Marchessa was still considered government property. And in the need to know sector, Marchessa’s whereabouts were already triangulated and her location locked on.

And it was dark outside and cold everywhere as Marchessa stood by the stained glass window in her bedroom looking out the circular peephole in the glass. She knew they couldn’t see her looking at them, so she watched as her neighbors were dragged from their home by police who were shouting commands to keep the unsuspecting guilty parties jumping while being herded to their consequence in a flurry of hostile confusion. These weren’t the first neighbors to meet such a fate. But this was as close as it had ever gotten. Marchessa’s breath came out in cold vapor as she watched the commotion. Her fingers were icy and aching from the chill. She didn’t have the money for electricity to take away the cold that had found its way inside her home. Things were different. It was a luxury now, as it was for a lot of people. And the ones who did have the means to get by didn’t want to be bothered by the hard luck of those around them. They must have done something to deserve such a fate. And so people turned a blind eye to their neighbors and towards things they didn’t want to get involved in, things that might brush off onto them should they find themselves too close to the situation or, lord forbid, related to the luck hardened and somehow be socially obligated to get involved as the government tried to oft their burdens onto the shoulders of unfortunate relatives hiding away as days of free government handouts slowly wound to an end and survival of the fittest began kicking in.

It was disturbing being a part of this kind of environment. It wasn’t something she was used to. Marchessa hadn’t grown up witnessing on a regular basis the dragging away of neighbors. But these kinds of harsh realities were beginning to spread out of the boundaries of the poor. And as the world began turning in more vicious circles and the economy brought more and more people to their knees, here they were being thrown out onto the streets like unwanted dogs destined for the pound.

It was spreading everywhere now. And there were so many factors at play merging, reacting and converging upon each other, upon each individual, each household, every town and city and state and obscuring the world until what it created was what she was watching, these kinds of reactions to each other in matching caustic events. And as people discovered exactly where they stood, the manipulation of them by those in charge kept many of them confused just long enough to take the fall.

She could see it because Marchessa had no blinders on, her father made sure of that. She knew it was important to grasp some level of understanding of the roots of one’s particular confusion so that you might know if you were next. So that you might know if it was your time to run, to hide from the all prying eyes of those who would sacrifice you to save their own. Because they would you know, take you down like a gazelle if they thought it would serve to buy them some distance from the chaos that was building in everyone’s peripheral vision. She knew this and watched as so many people threw others in the path of their own downfall, slowing it down and buying their time. The world had gone insane and saturated every corner of existence with its sickness as it trickled its way to where it was now, right outside Marchessa’s bedroom window.

It all seemed to revolve around a growing government corruption. She was watching as the pieces fit into place. In one way or the other people were either fleeing or being taken down by the destructive grip of government control. The warning flags were everywhere connected to things like crop failures and mega-corporations trying to patent the outright planting of food, seizing assets and freezing the accounts of farmers and organic food based businesses as these corporations tried to control the nay-sayers against modified seeds. With the FDA supporting the actions of these menacing mega-corporations, they rampaged their way through the pocketbooks of farmers causing food prices to skyrocket as the farmers lost their footing and in many cases their farms. Grain for feed became in short supply collapsing poultry farms and reducing the quality of feed given to livestock, creating mass slaughters and sell offs in its wake.

And nature took a heavy hand as towns drowned in floodwaters, crops froze in summer, tornadoes were breaking records, wind storms were breaking homes, fires ripped through forests, and mudslides, and earthquakes, volcanoes and sinkholes, and where did it stop? If it wasn’t for the forces of nature veiling the growing corruption of government, it would have been glaringly obvious to everyone, not just the ones already in its grip. Yet there were still pockets of people who remained untouched, though they were like targeted beacons in the chaos as a quiet panic settled in around the rest of the nation.

Then a ripple effect set in while government hunkered down to cover its assets. On every level they pillaged the people in a market that was beginning to cost more to keep business doors opened with fees for this and fines for that than could actually be made within an honest day’s work. Businesses began cutting corners to try to save costs in an attempt to make a profit where there was no profit to be made. Big and small tumbled, one right after the other, slamming doors shut to business and often closing the doors of their suppliers