Cosmic Undead

Pilot 2

A loud bang forced his tired eyes open. He slowly regained consciousness, as his brain slowly processed the present situation. 'Where am I?', he thought. He was in a dark room. There was a wooden table in front of him and there was a man sitting on the opposite side with folded arms.

"So are you going to talk, now, or you still don't understand what is going on? We don't have much time, Jeremy. Whether or not you give us a reason you took the shot, we already know and can prove that you did it. There's no use denying", the man leaned closer to him. "Talk to me, Jerry. What was the provocation?"

"What are you saying? What shot?", Jeremy was confused. He had no memory of who the man was, what he was talking about, or how he even got into the room. "Who are you?"

"Hey. You're not mad, Jeremy. We know that", the man got serious. "I'm Drake, once again, a cop. You killed your wife, Hailey Pence, and another man, to whom you are not related, named Owen Sanders. We already figured out a reason for the murders. The man's a male p********e. Your wife's a s*x addict. Is that it?"

Jeremy slammed his hands on the table. He was going to comment on the mentioned male p********e but there were more crucial things in what the officer had stated. "My wife's dead?", he asked, calmly. He couldn't imagine it.

"Yes, she is, and you already know that. She was shot in the head and you had a gun with you", Drake replied.

"It was a toy gun. I bought it from a toy shop, just to play a prank on my wife. I love her so much, I would never hurt her or kill anyone"

"So you had no grudge against your wife and the man?", the cop said, a little calmer than he had been, earlier. "I'm trying to help you, Jeremy. We need to know what led to the murder so I can help you get out of here"

"I know all of our conversations are getting recorded. You're lying"

"Are you saying you won't be giving out any information because you think we are recording the conversations to nail you and put you in jail?"

Jeremy sighed. "No. I'm saying even if I actually committed the crime, you can't help me in any way. I'm not so dumb"

"That's what you think but I walk solo", Drake leaned back. "I'm not with them. I've got a bigger case in front of me and yours- yours is just a prefix to it. In my case, I don't need you in jail. I don't want to nail you. At the moment, your case is irrelevant to me and the state. I want to nail the truth... In fact, there's a bigger villain behind the scenes and we need to bring him out.... But damn! Your wife's a b***h, man!"

"It was my fault", Jeremy replied. It was harder to think of how he had betrayed his wife, making her do something she would never have done. Thinking of her dead was much worse but he avoided it, desperately. Then, there was the thought of him as the killer- impossible! "I was focused on the wrong things at the wrong times. I didn't make her feel loved enough. She's could have waited, you know?... She was an addict but she always had her way with me. She felt I was always there but it stopped. I made the feeling stop"

"I'm very sorry about your wife, Jerry. I wish I could help but this is the only help I can offer. She already did it. She's already dead. Nothing will bring her back.... But sincerely, I wouldn't hesitate to shoot her, immediately I caught them. You gave them some time, didn't you?"

"You're trying to bring out the truth and it's already out. You can bring every method ever imagined and you'll still be getting the same response. I have never killed a person. I would never hurt my wife".

Drake sighed. Jeremy had no chance if he would keep denying the crime, neither did he have a chance of escape if he admitted it. He was the criminal and he didn't even know it. There was no memory of what happened after he left the house. The last image in his head was his wife, crying and begging him not to leave. Then, it was all blank. "I understand that you may not have been sober when you did this. I'm here to check your mental health"

Jeremy shut Drake's voice out of his head, trying to think. He could remember himself staggering out of the house but it was pretty vague. What was on his mind when he walked out of the house? 'I was just going to get some drink. Nothing happened', he thought.

There was only one bar he would have gone to. That was the only bar he patronized in town. "You remember something?", Drake asked, slowly reading Jeremy's expression.

"Where did you find the bodies? Where did the murders happen?", Jeremy asked, as he began to remember things he wasn't conscious of. He didn't go to his usual bar. He wasn't in his right senses so he assumed he didn't realize that when he walked in. The barmaid asked of his choice of drink and... he asked for tequila? He hated tequila as much as the bar he had walked into. There was no way he could have asked of that but he could remember himself doing it. 'What was I thinking?', he thought.

"Your wife's body was found right in front of your house. Neighbors claimed to have heard the gunshot, thirty five minutes after you left the bar", Drake replied. "Mr Owen's body was found, a few kilometers from the bar, that's two clubhouses away. The gunshot that killed him was heard, twenty minutes before your wife's"

"How-?", Jeremy was confused. The previously vague images seemed to be getting clearer. He desperately wished he was dreaming, as he couldn't imagine himself as a murderer. 'What have you done, Jerry?!!!', his mind screamed at him, echoing again and again.

"So what do you have to-?"

The door opened and a huge rugged man stepped in.

"Uh- oh. That's it", Drake muttered, looking disappointed and turned to the man. "He's about to talk"

"Hmm. Really", the man's rough face wore a frightening frown. "It doesn't look like."

The man walked closer to Jeremy and stood beside him. "I'm not going to wait a minute longer."

Jeremy had already gone deep in his thoughts. He had actually found the male p********e and he knew where he was going. There was no explanation of how he knew where to find the guy, the same way he couldn't explain how he forgot twelve hours of a conscious day he had just lived past. The next pictures on his head was his wife crying and begging for mercy. They were outdoor. He killed her and there was no way to explain how he did it or he how he got an actual gun... except the toy gun he had purchased was no child's play.

A huge thick hand grabbed the back of his head and swiftly slammed his forehead hard on the wooden table. His vision turned blank and he lost consciousness, immediately.

★

Like he had been in an excessively deep thought, he regained consciousness. He was on his feet. A bad headache reminded him of the last thing he remembered; an interrogation in a dark room. He tried to rub his forehead but there was a stinging bruise on it. The man must have slammed his head so hard.

‘What am I doing out here? How did I get out?’, he thought, looking back at the station. There was no memory of what had happened after the hit. He got into trouble, unconsciously. He was probably out of trouble, unconsciously again.

Cops began to rush out of the building. He didn’t need to confirm if they were coming after, though he desperately wished they weren’t. He had gotten a free chance to escape and he wouldn’t waste it on his silly confusion. Luckily, there was a bush path, leading out of town into a forest. He ran into the forest, as fast as he could and the cops ran after him.

They had spotted him, already. He couldn’t hide so he had to keep running. Panting heavily, he ran in between trees.

One of the cops shot twice but missed. “Don’t shoot. We weren’t asked to kill him”, he could hear one of the cops saying.

“Don’t shoot. I think they need him alive”

“The instruction was to bring him back dead or alive. Just do anything to stop him”

Jeremy wasn’t comfortable with how that sounded. They wouldn’t hold back anymore. He wasn’t needed alive so he could be shot dead if the cops found it fun. He moved his body faster, bending a little lower and trying to keep himself covered in the tall grasses.

He could see a field ahead. That was the worst place to run into. There would be no tree or tall grasses to hide him from their sight and they would be provoked to shoot him down. He turned, running around the edge of the field. They had lost sight of him so the cops went different ways, searching for him. He wasn’t safe in any way. He kept moving. If he was sneaky, the cops could catch up with him, and if he kept running, the noise of his heels and the rustling leaves would attract the cops closest to him. Either ways, he wasn’t going to rest. He had to keep going.

A strange dimmed colorful light appeared ahead of him. Jeremy was too busy escaping to fathom out what it was. He wasn’t only running closer to it. The light seemed to be moving closer to him too. If he was focused on it, he would notice but he was in danger. Every other thing is irrelevant. Moving closer to the light, a cop yelled from behind.

“Over here, guys! I found him!”, the cop said, and dashed towards him with his gun. “Stop!”

Jeremy had only glanced back to see the approaching cop. He was going to dive and hide himself but the light had moved fast at him and past him, along with an awfully satisfying wave of comfort. Whatever the light was, it was dispersing from a source. The wave lasted longer than a normal one. Jeremy closed his eyes, as his speed reduced. He didn’t feel himself running anymore. Neither did he remember that he was being chased by the cops. His eyes remained close till the wave was over.

Immediately it stopped, he staggered forward and opened his eyes. He was no longer in the bush path. He wasn’t in a forest he should end up in. He wasn’t in the weird field he was trying to avoid. He wasn’t in the city; at least, not the city he knows.

This was a new place. Another unexplainable ‘teleportation’, except he was pretty conscious, this time. “What’s coming next, now, uhn? Jeremy Pence allegedly killed a whole team of police officers in the bush path”, he muttered to himself, angrily.

He looked around. It was night where he was; standing in the middle of the road. It wasn’t night, a few minutes before the wave. He couldn’t see anyone around but he was obviously in the middle of a city. He walked in the middle of houses, yelling, “Hello!... Hello? Who’s around?”.

He couldn’t hear anything, not even the slightest possible sound. The skies were as dark as the night sky should. The only weird things are; how he got there, the absence of people, the absence of sound, and everything, literally. Everything was weird.