All Chapters of Field Team 42: Paranormal Responders: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

34 Chapters

Ch. 21 Getting Out of the Hospital

Mr. X was pleasantly surprised that I was so healed up and mobile. I got myself onto the gurney without assistance. “Wonderful, Dr. Leighton! I had no idea you were so well-along on your recovery. That will help us immensely as we escape.” Mr. X held up one of the gurney’s patient immobilization straps thoughtfully, then looked at me. “I completely understand your reluctance to use these, even for appearances sake. I am inclined to agree. Should we need to move quickly, abandoning our ruse that I am taking you somewhere as a patient, there won’t be time to unstrap you. I have another idea to make our appearance in the hallway look suitably deceptive.” Instead of strapping me to the gurney, Mr. X, whom I had always thought of as a Man in Black, though in his hospital orderly disguise he certainly wasn’t wearing black, draped a sheet over me, head to toe. “Now, Dr. Leighton, you will appear dead. Dead bodies on gurneys are covered in sheets like this and there’s no need to strap in t

Last Updated : 2025-04-29

Ch. 22 Meeting Mr. Y

Mr. Y looked a lot more like the stereotype of a Man in Black than Mr. X ever had because he dressed more the part. He wore the suit and hat of a 1950’s G-man, as opposed to Mr. X, who, when he wasn’t disguised as a hospital orderly, had always worn Victorian era clothing. Mr. Y was even wearing dark sunglasses in the underground parking garage where they clearly weren’t needed. His skin was the same crayola white as Mr. X’s. He never smiled, though, not at all, whereas Mr. X smiled at every possible conversational opportunity. The two of them seemed very, very opposite from one another.Mr. Y was accompanied by five men in some kind of military uniform, though not from any of the armed services that the general public knew about. They all had large automatic rifles aimed at Mr. X and me. Little, scary red dots veritably crawled over us, more of them on Mr. X than on me, but there were definitely some on me. I realized that meant that, whatever side Mr. Y was on, they didn’t really ca

Last Updated : 2025-04-30

Ch. 23 The Tunnel and Thorium Cars

I couldn’t see anything for what seemed like several long seconds. I’m not sure I was breathing, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable like I couldn’t breathe or like I was holding my breath either. I couldn’t hear anything. I had just started to wonder whether I was dead when we, Mr. X and I, complete with the car, whole, intact, not smashed or crashed, emerged from the other side of the wall. We had come out in what looked like an underground tunnel for car and truck traffic. A normal-looking road ran through the tunnel, complete with a dashed yellow painted line down the center and white solid painted lines on the edges of either side. The tunnel was lit with lights along the walls and hanging from the ceiling above, interspersed at about the intervals that street lights would have been on the surface. There was just one problem. We had not emerged aligned with the tunnel. We emerged from a side wall of the tunnel at the same speed we were going when we were in the parking garage. We we

Last Updated : 2025-05-01

Ch. 24 The Train Ride

After what I thought might have been about thirty minutes, a door appeared in the tunnel to our right, metal, obviously reinforced, with a small, lit up keypad right next to it. X steered us to it. He propped me up against the wall for support while he handled the keypad. By that time, I had become so weak that right before we saw the door, I had been about to say that I didn’t know how much further I could go. I noticed that my breath was coming in slight gasps as I leaned on the wall, watching X punch code after code into the keypad.Finally, something worked and the door opened with a loud mechanical hiss. I realized it had been hydraulically sealed. A gush of pressurized air came from the other side. X gently collected me and we walked through.On the other side was a train station. We were obviously still underground, but this station looked far larger, grander, and more fancy than any city’s subway station in the mundane world. Stairways went everywhere, both up and down. Dozens

Last Updated : 2025-05-02

Ch. 25 DUMBs

“Carl, do you know where you are?” X greeted me from the foot of a hospital bed. I blinked my eyes in a panic, wanting them to focus faster, to bring an end to the blurriness of my surroundings. I wanted to rub my eyes, but I realized that my arms, though not strapped down to the hospital bed, were attached to IVs. My right arm had two of them. My left arm had just one. I kept blinking my eyes hard, focusing them without assistance from my hands. As X and his surroundings came into view, I was relieved to see that I was not in the same hospital room as before.It’s not that I couldn’t still be in the same hospital because my extraction experience had been a dream, or returned to the same hospital after recapture, merely moved to a different room, but I could tell the room was very different from before. This room was clearly a single bed room. My other room had been a two-person room in which they just never gave me a roommate. The curtains weren’t plain white. They had a nice desig

Last Updated : 2025-05-02

Ch. 26 Alice is Back but Liz is Gone

A few hours later, as Friday’s sunrise was approaching, Liz had another, more detailed call with Control. She relayed to us that Control wanted us, if possible, to hunker down there at Alice’s until backup arrived. If circumstances forced us to move from Alice’s, we were to inform Control of our new whereabouts as soon as possible after we relocated. We risked a few forays upstairs Friday morning for more than just restroom use, but we made our camp in the basement to avoid being seen through upstairs windows. We brought a microwave from the kitchen downstairs along with food from the cabinets and upstairs fridge. Mont and Mitch even found a home game system hooked up to a small TV in a guest bedroom. We guys passed the time Friday gaming and eating. I got to have normal male bonding time with Mitch and Mont as if we were colleagues from a regular, normal, mundane job with normal lives. We laughed and smiled a lot. I realized they were the kind of guys I’d be friends with anyway if

Last Updated : 2025-05-03

Ch. 27 The Green Man

Friday night, we stayed in Alice’s basement as we had Thursday night, but there was a new tension in the air. Not that there hadn’t been tension before. After all, we were wanted by the sheriff’s department in a small Arizona town that was under a powerful curse that was due to start having its effects Sunday night at midnight, including bringing to life supernatural threats from the pasts of Agents of Control, including even more Agents of Control on their way as backup. Who knew what kinds of supernatural horrors the backup Agents had been exposed to, if my own colleagues’ stories of giants in Kandahar, ghosts of the dead appearing to the living, and cosmic eldritch cults in Canada were to be believed? And believe them, I did. When we contacted Control to report Liz going AWOL from the group, Mont handled the call. He was second-in-command of the group, which made him in charge with Liz gone. Control instructed us to use Spitfire’s comm equipment to monitor the local police and em

Last Updated : 2025-05-05

Ch. 28 The Good Rock Mine

Old Man Brooks’s family had leased a nearby mine to the Good Rock Mining Company. The mine had been closed down for the past 12 years, but there were still buildings there, surrounded by security fencing. The security fencing wasn’t hard to get past. Local kids and thrillseekers had already seen to that with wire cutters. We had taken off from Alice’s in the predawn hours when we were least likely to be spotted. We planned to complete the five milehike necessary around sunrise. Alice had offered to lend us her car, but Mont didn’t like the thought of us having it if she wound up needing it. He also didn’t want her car to entangle her with us in the sheriff’s eyes since it hadn’t been proven yet that she was working with us. Alice had also wanted to come with us. Mont denied this request, but it was a very understandable one. She and her fellow townsfolk who wanted to explore and understand the Dirt had been at it their entire lives. For some outsiders to come along and see all the

Last Updated : 2025-05-06

Ch. 29 Finding Liz

The twenty foot by thirty foot office building we were in consisted of one large room, except for a men’s room and a ladies’ room in the back. In hindsight, we should have thought to check those, I suppose. Even though I was “the new guy”, still getting used to life and procedures as a field agent, I felt really dumb when the ladies’ room door swung open. I can only imagine how frustrated with themselves Mont and Mitch felt, veterans that they were. There in the doorway stood Liz. She’d been in the restroom the entire time. As Mont had guessed, she must have used her own Control-issued multi-key to get in. But, then who had re-locked it from the outside, trapping her in here? The sheriff’s department, to keep her out of the way while the Dirt blew in, maybe? But they would have just taken her to jail, wouldn’t they? Liz looked terrible, as if she hadn’t slept in weeks. Her usual demeanor, that of a prima donna corporate manager was gone. At that point, she just looked tired and los

Last Updated : 2025-05-07

Ch. 30 Underdenver

Internal bleeding. That’s what the doctors said happened to me when I passed out on the train getting here to Underdenver. They think the car crash–never a good thing for anyone to experience–was especially not good for someone still recovering from the damage I’d sustained in Dust Bowl. I may be writing to you again from a hospital, dear reader, but at least this hospital in Underdenver is a lot nicer place. The people are a lot nicer and I have a lot more freedom. Nurses or orderlies come and take me out of my room daily, not only for therapy, but just for the sake of getting out. I’m not just left in my room to mentally rot while my body heals. There’s even a social room to hang out with other patients. The next day after my arrival here at this hospital in Underdenver, X came and got me and personally pushed me in a wheelchair into the social room. (They say they’ll let me try to start walking on my own tomorrow.) It wasn’t too crowded. We were able to find a corner with some co

Last Updated : 2025-05-09

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