Page 90 of Echoes
“The CIA ran a project. Well, back in the sixties and seventies, they ran a lot of them, and not all of them were successful. This one was, though. Lydia and I found a journal that my father had written. My mother had kept it hidden all these years. I don’t know if she ever actually read it, but I don’t think so,” Eliza said. “Anyway, in that, we found the CIA connection. The government ran a project that focused on bringing the dead back to life.”
“Bringing people back to–” Rachel stopped.
“Yes. And it worked. My dad didn’t put all the details in this journal, but he mentioned that it worked on at least one person.”
“That person was Eliza’s grandfather,” Lydia said and took Eliza’s hand.
“He’d been close to death already, so he volunteered, and itworked. He was brought back to life and lived until he was old and gray. He told my dad about the device and asked him to protect it from the man with the CIA.”
“But the CIAcreatedthe project that made the device,” Rachel noted.
“The man who was running the project wanted to take the device and use it for soldiers on the battlefield. The device didn’t just bring people back one-hundred-percent. It cured my grandfather’s cancer somehow, but that was probably due to the radiation the device emitted, according to the journal.”
“Radiation?” Violet asked, turning to Rachel now.
“The device you have isn’t that one,” Rosie explained. “Long story, and it’s confusing, I know, but she’s getting to the point. Go on, Eliza.”
“Anyway, the soldiers they wanted to use it on would be shot, blown up, and battered, and the device would bring them back, but if they’d lost an eye or had brain damage, it wouldn’t justfixthat. They’d be in pain and miserable. The team who created theoriginaldevice didn’t want that, so they destroyed it.”
“They just destroyed it?” Rachel asked.
“Yes,” Lydia replied. “But when they destroyed it, the energy that the thing emitted killed someone. It was a janitor who was working in the building. The team had all left and set a timer to have a shock short out the device. They were going to go back in and tear it apart after. They didn’t know that the guy was inside until they found him.”
“Destroying the new device is dangerous, which is why we didn’t do it the first time and tossed it into the ocean instead,” Eliza added. “Anyway, the CIA agent wanted the device, and the team wouldn’t make him a new one. There’s more to it than that, but the gist of it is that this should’ve been the end of it, but the CIA agent was essentially ousted from the agency and blackballed, from what we found out later. He had a son, though, whom he raised to be a bitter man who resented anyone involved in the project, including my grandfather and, as a result, my father, whom he killed searching for the device and the redemption that his father clearly craved. We think he was hoping to bring his father back to life with it as well, but the device my dad had wasn’t that original one. It was different.”
“It allowed Eliza to see the past, me to see the present, and you to see the future,” Rosie said. “We don’t completely understand it, butit’s as if it’s meant to help you when you need it, show you something to get you somewhere else.”
“We’ve always seen it as a good thing,” Felicity added. “And we didn’t know anything about it other than that until Rosie did a documentary about her work on that shipwreck and they showed footage of the expedition.”
“I’m a nerd,” Lydia said. “I watched the documentary and recognized the case.”
“We realized Rosie brought it up and went to find her just to see if she still had it,” Eliza added. “We didn’t know if she’d used it or not. But she had, and then, she told us she buried it here. And now, we’re sitting in your living room.”
“But why do you need it now?” Rachel asked. “You said that the guy who killed your dad is dead.”
“Someone else is looking for it,” Eliza replied. “A man showed up at our house. He didn’t say he was looking for it, exactly. He told me he was a cop and that he had more questions about my father’s death, but his questions weren’t really about that at all. He asked for water and when I came back from the kitchen with a glass for him, he wasn’t there. I found him in the garage. He said he was looking for the bathroom, but he wasn’t. He was looking for the device.”
“Who do you think he is?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know. He had a badge and a gun. The badge might have been fake, but the gun wasn’t, and it’s possible he has a real badge, too,” Eliza said.
“When she told me about that, I knew we needed to find it and finally destroy the thing,” Lydia explained. “We’ll do it far away from people, but we can’t have this thing out there.”
“It doesn’t bring people back to life anymore, though,” Violet noted.
“No, it doesn’t. The note said that it was altered by the death of some woman. The journal we found said that she had made the new device. I don’t know if she was on this team or what, but she died, and the device ended up in the hands of my grandfather. Now, I need to destroy it so that no one else dies. I got the impression that this guy wasn’t going to just take no for an answer. Lydia got home and opened the garage just in time. There were people outside, walking their dogs, and parents with their kids, or I think he might have pulled that gun on me and asked me where it was, just like the other guy did with a knife to my father.”
“You think he’ll be back?” Violet asked.
“Weknowthat he was,” Lydia shared. “Our house was ransacked two days ago. That was when we visited Rosie and Felicity, hoping that they had the device. We thought we’d just ask for it back, saying it was our luggage or something from the cruise we took, and it fell overboard. Stupid, I know, but it was the only way I thought we could convince them to hand it over, no questions asked.”
“They thought I’d put it in some museum or in storage as part of the wreck findings,” Rosie offered. “And, well, I didn’t, obviously. They gave us enough to let me know that they’d used it, too.”
“And they looked scared,” Felicity added.
“So, we told them about our story with the thing and that it was buried under my old pool.”
“Now, we’re here to get it back,” Eliza finished.