Keep Me Safe Read online

  Keep Me Safe

  JS Harker

  Copyright © 2020 by JS Harker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  This title is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, events, and places is coincidental.

  For the readers and dreamers

  Contents

  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

  About the Author

  Also by JS Harker

  Chapter One

  The pen ran out of ink. Jesse tapped it on his napkin and attempted to scrawl, but it refused to come back to life. His journal page was blemish free so far. He refrained from doodling in margins, and took great care with every pen stroke. Someday it’d be part of his legacy, but right now the most exciting thing it contained was a detailed account of how long he took to move halfway across the country.

  Which was a snoozefest. He wasn’t even sure why he’d put it in there, except he wanted to chronicle everything he did in St. Louis.

  Jesse tossed down the empty pen and it careened into his coffee cup. In his rush to keep the cup upright, he almost smacked it over again. Smooth. He suppressed a sigh. This wasn’t his finest morning. The woman he was supposed to meet was running late and he still had to go home and grab his suit jacket, badge, and gun.

  Too bad he couldn’t approach Spooky True Tales as himself. He had to use a cover ID. The podcasters, Peyton and Celia, spent far too much time accusing the FBI of covering up the reality of aliens and other conspiracies. They were like him, uncovering the truth and dangers hidden from the world. If they met Special Agent Jesse Dawes, then they’d probably see that as validation for every strange theory that came their way. Or they would think he was feeding them lies. No, Jesse couldn’t participate in conversations about aliens without raising some eyebrows and concerns, but his persona Ephraim O’Shay could.

  If the FBI found out that Jesse believed in the strange and paranormal, that he had an active interest in investigating the bizarre, then he could kiss his career goodbye. Sometimes he was still surprised he’d made it through the bureau’s rigorous background check.

  That was why he kept his journal. Digital files could be hacked, but physical ones could be kept safe at home. He would pass on his record of anything weird that he encountered living in St. Louis. Exactly as his great-uncle Ephraim had done.

  Jesse dug into his messenger bag. His table was at the front of the coffee shop, so he could watch passersby while waiting for his contact from the podcast.

  A woman in jeans walked past, and then the door to the shop chimed as it opened. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, like him, and she wore casual clothes. Along with jeans and a lightweight jacket, she had on a black T-shirt with the phrase They’re here! A couple of UFOs decorated the words. Her earrings were little green men, and the sunglasses she settled onto her dark brown hair were bright green as well. She looked just like her picture on the Spooky True Tales website.

  She asked, “Ephraim O’Shay?”

  “Celia Sanchez. It’s a pleasure.” Jesse held his hand out toward her and she shook it quickly and confidently.

  Celia slid onto the other seat at the small table. “I was going to buy your coffee.”

  “Sorry, couldn’t wait. Morning caffeine is required prior to diving into the world’s mysteries.” Jesse slid his journal into his messenger bag and took out the manila folder.

  “Down to business,” Celia said. “I can appreciate a serious man.”

  Jesse laid the folder between them on the table. “I’ve got to get to work soon.”

  “Then I guess we’ll make this quick.” Celia opened the folder.

  “Not sure quick will do it justice.”

  Celia laughed. “Rarely does, am I right?”

  He wasn’t sure if that was a flirtation or an attempt to make small talk. He kept his mouth closed and waited while she looked over the file. The sooner the documents were away from the coffee shop, the better. While he could claim he pulled a few of them for a new case, some of those records weren’t supposed to be in civilian hands. Crowley Construction hadn’t done anything illegal that he could prove. The company was massive, and had a CEO known for quashing investigators like a bug.

  If Celia could understand the case without more explanation than what he laid out in the folder, then he had enough evidence that he might have a case he could take to his supervisor. His life would get so much easier if he could walk into the field office and request resources. No more late nights poring over conspiracy threads, or gathering articles, looking for common threads. He could get warrants. Do shit during the day. Maybe have more of a life.

  A wrong note in the coffee shop’s music dragged Jesse out of his mental groove. The music warbled off key, filtered through the speakers with cracks despite being connected to satellite radio. A man in a black hoodie sat in the far corner of the shop, bent over his laptop as he typed away. Two women sat at one of the tables with notebooks in front of them, but were spending more time chatting and drinking coffee than writing. Another woman was using her phone with one hand while sipping from the cup in her other. An artist scowled at his sketch book. The baristas stared at their phones between taking or filling orders.

  Overall, the place demanded a miserable kind of quiet. An undefinable pressure weighed on the whole coffee shop, as if drawing too much attention would bring dreadful consequences.

  The neighborhood surrounding the coffee shop had the same feel. In the three months since Jesse moved to St. Louis, the oppressive wrongness had stretched down the street like the specter of Christmas Future.

  The epicenter was across the street from the coffee shop.

  The building loomed around its neighbors, even though it wasn’t the tallest. Despite the clean new brick and shining windows, it struck Jesse as a terrible place to live, and they weren’t finished building. But he had seen the company before: Crowley Construction. They built in over a dozen major US cities and several international ones. This building of theirs wasn’t the first Jesse had encountered, but it did have the strongest sense of wrongness to it.

  Jesse itched to point it out to Celia. He bounced his foot, unable to suppress his anxious energy.

  “Give me the big picture,” Celia said. “You said in your email that you think they’re running experiments. What kind?”

  Damn, he was really hoping she’d spot it on her own. Jesse scooted closer, wincing as his chair scraped the floor, and lowered his voice. “I know the impact they’re having, and where. But I don’t know how they’re doing it. Their building records don’t indicate any unusual materials. I figure it has to be something that they’re putting in afterward.”

  “Like wha
t?”

  Jesse bit his lip. Admitting his craziest theory might turn Celia away, but then she did run a podcast about the strange. As odd as Jesse’s hypothesis was, he’d heard weirder on her show. “An alien. Or some kind of extra-dimensional presence.”

  Celia raised her eyebrows. “Are they running experiments on humans or aliens?”

  “I don’t know,” Jesse said. “I can’t really get inside and dig around without raising suspicion, but everywhere they build, the neighborhood shifts.”

  “It’s called gentrification. As despicable as that can be, it’s not grounds for a segment on my show.”

  Jesse pulled out one of the articles. “This is different. Where they build, suicide rates rise. Violence triples. This place in Boston? Over half the residents sought psychiatric care after a thunderstorm. And it’s not just humans who are affected. There are more dog attacks. Rabid raccoons. There’s at least one case of a squirrel throwing nuts at anyone too close to its tree.”

  “I’m seeing correlation, not causation,” Celia replied.

  Jesse was on the verge of spreading out the pages and reenacting the Pepe Silva gif. Why couldn’t she see it like he did? “Neighborhood prices go down, not up, and still no one wants the apartments. Whatever experiment they’re running messes with people’s mental health. I don’t know what their end goal is, but I do know that the government is looking the other way. Something wrong is happening here.”

  “I think I need that on a T-shirt. Put an American flag behind it. See how that goes over.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re so dismissive.”

  Celia stacked the papers together. “Because mysterious experiments are nothing new. The government has been running them on people in this area since the nineteen-sixties, and on the country a lot longer than that. It’s disturbing that corporations can get away with it, but not surprising. And these documents aren’t proof of anything. They’re conjecture.”

  “Last week’s podcast was about a guy’s encounter with Sasquatch,” Jesse replied. “This is something that is actually happening.”

  “Sasquatch guy had a great story, and he was a fantastic storyteller. This?” Celia waved her hand at the folder. “Is nothing but scare tactics. Give me a story I can run with, and I’ll be glad to include it.”

  Jesse had years’ worth of stories, but none of them his own. His great-uncle Ephraim had left behind decades’ worth of journals. They detailed his time as an FBI agent who coordinated with a secretive government agency called the Department of the Weird and Occult. Formally the DWO disbanded in the early nineteen-fifties, but Ephraim’s journals chronicled the DWO’s shift into obscurity. The department continued to investigate aliens from outer space and monsters from other realities. They were the first line of defense against terrors and nightmares.

  Jesse longed to do his part, but as far as he could discover, the DWO didn’t have open recruitment. They might not even exist anymore. Meanwhile, monsters kept to the shadows. Big corporate CEOs hid behind walls of legal protection backed by incredible wealth. Being an FBI agent didn’t magically open the door to a new world of fighting crime and monsters. Hell, the greatest threat he faced at the office was cleaning the coffee machine. Descaling was definitely not part of the take-down-scumbag dreams he’d had since middle school.

  But he hadn’t gotten this far only to give up.

  “These corporations are manipulating people. Hurting them. That’s a story worth telling,” Jesse said.

  “If you had a witness, or even an account from one, that could place the blame on the corporation, then I could run a segment on the big bad board of over-rich directors looking to profit off the rest of us. It’s not exactly in our usual wheelhouse, but it’s something I could swing.”

  “No one else has put it together. They don’t know what’s happening to them. You have to tell people.”

  Celia scoffed. “Do you have any idea how many times a day I hear that? What if you’re wrong? I can’t support an article of pure fiction. We’re not that kind of podcast.”

  Spooky True Tales ran stories on Area 51, lake monsters, demonic possessions, eldritch being sightings, and the latest theories involving government cover-ups of paranormal activity. She should have believed him, but she was blowing him off. Worse than that, she didn’t seem to care.

  Jesse nodded at the building across from them. Crowley Construction signs hung on the metal fence surrounding the new structure. “We’re sitting inside a hot zone. Can’t you feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  “When I came in three weeks ago, you couldn’t get the baristas to shut up.” Jesse gestured at the man in the corner. “That guy on his laptop? He used to chat them up. I thought they might get a poly relationship going. Now look at them.”

  One barista was still on his phone, and the other attacked the spotless counter with an industrial cleaner. The man at his laptop moved his lips along with the words he typed while he consulted a journal.

  “They could be having a bad day,” Celia said.

  Jesse groaned. She seemed determined not to believe him. There had to be some way to convince her. He pulled out an article on the rise of rat populations. “If you just take a look—”

  “I’ll go over it later.”

  Her words sounded hollow and placating. He had to make one more plea. “The only way this problem will end is if we expose them. I don’t have the platform, but you do.”

  “I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I’m one tiny podcast with a couple hundred subscribers. And those subscribers, as odd as it may seem to you, are extremely picky about what they believe,” Celia said. “I can’t fling any old information at them and have it take off. If that’s what you were hoping for, I’m sorry. It just isn’t going to happen.”

  Damn it all. The comments posted all over the podcast’s social media had led Jesse to think the listeners would believe him and pick up the torch. If it took off, then the conspiracy could eventually hit other news outlets. With enough accusations and suspicions, Jesse could open a federal investigation into Crowley Construction and bring the bastards down.

  But his plan started with Celia, and it looked like it was about to end with her.

  “You have a voice. I’m no one,” he said.

  “You could make your own podcast or blog,” Celia countered. “Build your own voice.”

  “It’s not that easy.” For starters, if anyone at work found him with a conspiracy blog that wasn’t part of a cover, he would wind up transferred to a remote location. Assuming, of course, they didn’t bully him into quitting or outright fire him.

  Jesse pushed the folder closer to her. “Please. Take a deeper look.”

  Celia sighed and took the folder into her lap. “I can’t promise it’ll make it onto the show. Would you be interested in headlining the piece if it came to that?”

  Jesse’s throat tightened. His Ephraim O’Shay persona wasn’t a fool proof smokescreen. “I can’t.”

  Celia pressed her lips together. She’d probably toss his folder in the garbage on her way out the door.

  He didn’t have any more time to plead with her. If she wouldn’t take up the investigation, he’d have to keep digging by himself. Either he would find enough evidence to convince her, or he’d find another program that was willing to believe him.

  Resolute, Jesse grabbed his messenger bag and his coffee, and stood. “You have my email. If you find a new lead, I might be able to use it to find out more.”

  “You’re going to keep looking?” Celia asked.

  “I have to.”

  Celia gazed up at him, a careful scrutinizing expression on her face. Any hint of flirtation was gone, and Jesse wondered how much of her behavior had been an act. Did he need to worry that she would snag the story and give him zero credit?

  Screw taking any glory for discovering the truth. He didn’t need it. He needed someone to do something about the monster lurking in his neighborhood.

  Celia tight
ened her grip on the folder, and nodded. “I’d be interested in what you find, especially if you discover exactly what they’re doing. Keep me up to date and I’ll share what I can.”

  That was an unexpected shift toward his way of looking at the case. Jesse tried not to sound too eager as he said, “Good.”

  “Stay in touch.”

  “I’ll be sure to.”

  Jesse headed for the door. The man in the dingy black hoodie shoulder-checked Jesse and beat him to leaving the shop. Despite Jesse doing nothing challenging, the man glared over his shoulder at him. He muttered either a curse or a random burst of syllables. His words weren’t distinct or loud enough to make out.

  Mental illness ran in Jesse’s family, which was one reason he didn’t share his alien conspiracies with them. At least one cousin usually suffered through an episode during the massive family reunions and holiday events. From training and experience, Jesse knew the difference between someone having a bad mental day and someone on the edge of becoming dangerously unstable. He followed the man out of the shop and couldn’t shake the feeling that he fell into the second category.

  Just a bad day in the neighborhood. Sure. And Batman wore a bright sparkling pink cape.

  Actually, Jesse would pay to see that. That mental image was kind of fun.

  As he went to turn his head away from the man, he ran into someone. Coffee splattered between them, soaking into his dress shirt. He backpedaled, but the man he’d run into caught him by the arm and stopped him.

  And what a man he was, too. He had brown eyes the deep color of buckeyes, short black hair, and a dazzling smile. He was a couple inches taller than Jesse, putting him over six feet tall. He was just shy of broad-shouldered, and he was muscular. Jesse had felt that when they collided, and in the easy strength the man used in pulling him to a stop. His dark blue dress shirt fit him well, and drew Jesse’s attention downward. His physique definitely came from training often and seriously. Half the guys at Quantico hadn’t looked so good.