Something potent.

Agent Singer slammed his fist on the cheap formica counter as Agent Montrose poured himself a fresh cup of coffee. "Fucking bitch!" he spat.

Montrose shrugged. "I don't know, I feel like she's nicer than most of the people we **** for months."

Singer resisted the urge to grab Montrose's coffee and throw it in his face. "She's mocking us, Montrose. She and her fucking cult leader are playing games with us and I'm getting sick of it."

"I got sick of it a long time ago," Montrose replied. "Still, this cheerleader act is new. Do you think it means anything?"

"Who fucking knows?" his partner grumbled. "Probably just the guy fucking with us. Or maybe he just a fresh new batch of mind-fucked zombie slaves and he's in a good mood."

"Maybe..." Montrose trailed off. "But we've had her for the better part of a year and I've never seen her like this. She's really excited about something."

"Oh, really? You think so? Well maybe if you go in there and ask really nicely, she'll tell you what it is. Because if she keeps stonewalling us like she's done every day since we picked her up, your keen insight is worth exactly nothing."

Now Montrose resisted the urge to slap some sense into his colleague. He was sure that something slipped, that they had just found their way in, but Singer's pessimism had ossified into an unyielding conviction that this was a complete dead-end. Montrose silently slipped away to the control room, where he watched Sam on a small CCTV monitor. She was chuckling and clapping like a kid at the circus. What has got her so chipper?

Six months earlier...

Even through the haze of tears Sam could tell that Rocky was scowling again. She lay on the bare mattress, shivering and sweating madly, grinning from ear to ear. She was completely nude and curled into the fetal position.

"W-w-what's this?" she asked them. "D-d-did you boys come-come-come up with a special cocktail j-j-just for me?"

Rocky just glared at her. Bullwinkle whispered something to him and he shook his head. Bullwinkle spoke.

"Sam, what we're giving you will cause an intense delirium as well as disordered thinking and hallucinations. It has some rather unpleasant effects, but I think we've pretty well established that those don't faze you."

"S-s-s-so w-why?" she asked through chattering teeth. It felt simultaneously like she was freezing to ****, was on fire, and like those sensations were happening to someone else while she took a relaxing bath.

"No reason not to tell you, I suppose. We're hoping that if we cloud your mind enough, you may start to tell us things without realizing it. Think of what's about to happen as a fever dream combined with an acid trip, DMT, and temporary schizophrenia."

"S-s-sounds like..." Sam trailed off, her eyes suddenly clouding. "Sounds... sounds... soouunds?"

She looked at Bullwinkle quizzically. His face seemed to distort a little. She had a question for him, but she couldn't remember. "Sooounds? Sooounnnds?"

"It's happening," Rocky said, but Rocky was a tree a bush a tree a squirrel and she was holding it down.

"Holding what down?" The sounds? "Holding it down." The sounds? Who was talking? Everything she saw was frantic shards, like it was there and not-there and looking up at the down with-

"Your leader," Rocky said gruffly, and a thousand tiny sailboats made their way across the room carrying the meaning to her. She smiled and opened her arms wide to receive them, taking the words into her chest, feeling them melt against her bare breasts that were sweaty and cold and hot and sweaty and-

"Tell us about him." This was a command, and it bounced out of his mouth straight upward to form circles, circlets around his head, and she was looking at it with her mouth gaping and pussy gaping and her mind gaping, it was just too much.

"It was filling the room," somebody slurred. "The spider." It was filling the room. "Somebody slurred?" The spider? Sam felt like she was mud, like she was thinking mud, and WHACK across her face she was looking up at the ceiling, her eyes stinging singing like a harmony in a thousand choruses, all of Jake's little thoughts drip drip dripping into her fractured broken mind like a

"Grease catcher," she told them. Bullwinkle just stood there with his "big dumb eyes," she said, "like moose. Like a moose."

Rocky put his mouth to Bullwinkle's ear was he pulling the brain out? Was he? Was he pulling the brain out of Bullwinkle's head was he?

"Are you sure?" it was an angel who spoke although it was also Bullwinkle. "She's pretty far gone already."

"Just fucking do it," it was a devil who spoke now, it was Rocky, just Rocky, the little devil squirrel. She laughed and laughed and Bullwinkle was talking "ok Sam just a little more" and Bullwinkle was talking a pinch in her arm, a pinch where there was just a little more.

"Tell us what's on your mind," Bullwinkle said and she tried to laugh but was racked with a coughing fit. Her mind?

"My m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-mmmmmm?" she "Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmmmmmmind?" she "Mmmmmy mind?"

Rocky sat on a folding chair like two planets on a chocolate bar and there was throwup coming from her face and the guys were going back and forth and yelling and she really couldn't think. They were bending over and saying and paper towel on the floor, on the throwup vomit and was that her? Was there a piece of her in there?

"Don't throw m-m-me away," she was tired, "But I drove my Chevy drove my Chevy drove a sourdough rye. And times like these, I need relief, I need relief."

"Singing?" was the she was Rocky too, she was everyone. "Singing?" Angrier. "Fuck this," she was singing Rocky left and she was just with Bullwinkle the good one.

"You're the good one," Sam told it and moose made smile to talk and over.

"Thank you," thank you, "my partner just gets impatient sometimes. I'd love to hear how you're doing right now."

"I..." she didn't know, "am..." she didn't know, "fucked..." she didn't know, "UP. I. Am. Fucked. Up!"

He nodded and it felt like a grandpa nodding saying good job to her. "I know, Samantha. I'd just like you to tell me whatever you're thinking right now. Even if it doesn't make sense, just say it."

"Just say it?" she was. "Just say it? She is. I am. I am him. I like to eat at tables with my friends and J- I am him. He's the same thing, though, isn't it? With egg and so on, I am him with also me. And everybody else!"

She smiled warmly, thinking of Everybody Else. "Everybody Else is him, he's him and I'm him and there's three of us. There's him, there's me, there's everybody else, but we are not the same person but we are of the same person, it's mandiful bastenly causation. I'm throwup."

It was coming out of her more, she knew her body should feel bad bad bad with it all but it couldn't because Jake was giving her so much good right now that there was nowhere to fit the bad.