by Rob Horner
“Someone’s hacking you?” Brian asked incredulously.
“Not possible,” came Billy’s reply. “He’s just rerouting camera signals so I have a hard time seeing what’s happening. I’m pretty sure there weren’t more than five or six to begin with.”
“Can you see us?” Debbie asked.
“No.” There was a sound of rapid-fire keystrokes. “But I can see down the imaging hall. Looks like there’s one down, like, forever down, and one more coming.”
“Billy says there’s one more coming,” Brian hissed to Lieutenant Barnes.
Travis looked up at the ceiling, following the lines of current, tracing them through the walls, seeing the glowing rectangles that indicated the fluorescent light banks along the hall. Almost like looking through a blueprint in three dimensions, he searched to the far end of the corridor. Then, concentrating, he began turning the lights off one at a time, working back toward their position. He left a light bank burning about midway down but turned off the ones over their heads.
“Go on across,” Brian hissed.
Travis and Sherry moved through the darkness, easing behind the lieutenant, joining Debbie on the other side. Brian tapped the lieutenant on the shoulder, whispering, “You go on ahead, I got this.” Nodding, Barnes scooted to his left, joining the other three.
“Billy,” Brian said, assuming a prone position, “I’m covering the side corridor, let me know if anyone tries to creep up from the lobby.”
“Will do. I can’t see shit in the corridor except where the light is, and that’s empty right now. I’ve got my other laptop running a random cycle through the camera feeds. I’m hoping that’ll keep the guy in the office confused. He’s basically limited to trying to block me when he knows what camera I’m on.”
“I don’t need the inside baseball, just the score.”
“All right, well the current score is home team zero, visitors four.”
“Three of those are mine,” Brian said. “Looks like I scored a hat trick.”
“I don’t…hey…isn’t that a different sport?” Billy asked.
5
The carry-on bag weighed a ton, Travers thought, as he reached out to pull it closer.
His legs barely had the strength to keep him upright and he worried that if he fell, he wouldn’t be able to rise again.
Even as he thought this, he spotted the oh-so-comfortable desk chair just a few feet away.
He needed that chair, if only to keep himself in a semi-upright position. Reaching, straining, keeping his left hand on the desk and feeling all the pain in the right side of his chest, he managed to grab one of the dark leather arm rests. With a grunt of effort which came out as another spray of blood spilling over his lips, Buck managed to pull the chair close enough to drop into it.
Mind fuzzy, he reached into the bag and grabbed a small box. It was about the same size as the old VHS tapes everyone used to rent to watch movies. Opening the package proved difficult but not impossible. Inside was the second-skin glove.
His right hand felt stupid, but thankfully all he needed to do was hold it still while his left hand arranged the glove. This operation took his full concentration, so when he finally got the glove on, he realized he’d been able to ignore the alarm for a few seconds. The pain in his chest remained, but it had dulled a bit.
His right hand fell onto the palm reader and the login screen disappeared, replaced by a desktop image with several icons. Their names were fuzzy and indistinct—maybe the screen needed to be cleaned? —but he knew what image he wanted.
Using his right hand to manipulate the mouse was out of the question; when he tried, it slid off the palm reader and fell into his lap. Grunting, he reached across his body and took hold of the device with his left hand, clumsily guiding the cursor over an icon that resembled a small, yellow mushroom cloud. The white letters under the icon were unintelligible, but he didn’t need to read its name. He’d commissioned the program. It was called XAbort.
Double-clicking the icon with his left hand brought up a small textbox, cursor already flashing inside of it.
All he needed to do now was enter the codename of the subject he wanted to terminate.
Focusing intently on the keyboard, he moved the index finger of his left hand to the first character.
6
Do you feel it? Sherry asked.
Like we can do anything? Travis asked.
Yeah, something like that.
I feel it, Travis affirmed.
There was something building inside of them, growing stronger by the second. What had seemed difficult before now came easily. Thought alone was enough to cause change.
Maybe we’re just getting used to our powers, Sherry suggested.
Travis didn’t know, but her guess was a reasonable explanation.
“The elevator,” Debbie said, coming to the end of the corridor. The wall appeared as one with the rest of the hallway, off-white, with no indication that anything of the sort existed there.
“There’s a panel here,” Travis said, indicating the palm-reader set on the right wall.
“I doubt it’ll work for us,” Sherry said.
“Billy?” Debbie asked, interrupting his and Brian’s distracting sports euphemisms.
“He’ll be coming into the paint in in three, two…one—”
Two rapid gunshots filled the corridor with sound. Sherry squealed in surprise.
“Brian took down another one,” Debbie confirmed for the group.
“There’s one more working through the lobby,” Billy said.
“Everyone get down, backs against the wall,” Debbie hissed.
“I see him coming,” Brian’s voice whispered into her headset. “Letting him get a little closer—”
Again came the sound of gunshots. The bank of fluorescents above their heads shattered, frosted glass raining down around them. Brian emerged from the darkness a moment later, walking towards them. He looked at the glass on the floor and asked, “Anyone hurt?”
A chorus of no’s answered the question. “Good,” he said. “There’s usually not more than five or six guards here when they have no subjects to work on. We’ve taken down six, and Billy is certain there’s one in the security room upstairs.”
“So, we should be safe now?” Travis asked.
Brian nodded. “Now, how can we open this elevator?”
A moment of silence passed, then Billy said, “I can’t access it; must be on an internal circuit.”
“He can’t open it,” Debbie said for their benefit.
“Let us,” Travis said, stepping past Debbie.
The blue lines fed the palm reader, running through and around it in a tangled mess. Other lines ran from the reader to the wall at the end of the corridor. Apparently, the reader was used only to access the elevator. Once inside, it ought to be easy to get the thing to move.
Should we just surge it? Sherry asked.
Travis didn’t know. Concentrating, he sought to look deeper, to pass through the protection of the reader and find the mechanism that would open the door.
Let’s look at it this way, Sherry suggested, if it’s like all the other circuits we’ve worked on, it takes a ground to complete the circuit path.
So, Travis said, following her logic, maybe all the palm reader does is provide that ground to the other side of the circuit. Once it has a path, the door should open.
In most circuits where switching was required, the switch had a constant source of power on one side and needed an absence of power on the other in order to allow current to flow through. To make the doors work, they needed a difference of potential, a ground applied to the side of the switch opposite the one with constant power.
Ignoring the palm reader except as a reference, Travis focused on the lines running from the reader and into the wall. He imagined a damper in the line, pulling the current down, and was rewarded with a soft swish as the wall at the end of the corridor pulled up into the ceiling. Behind it were typical gr
ay elevator doors, split vertically down the middle. They were closed, so Travis held his concentration on the palm reader, maintaining the false ground. If he let it go, the corridor wall would descend again.
“It’s coming,” Sherry said, watching the lines pulse behind the elevator doors, as electrical impulses drove motors that wound cables routed over pulleys to raise the elevator car.
Without the usual ding, the elevator doors opened.
“Well I’ll be,” Brian muttered softly.
“You already are,” Debbie returned, hurrying into the elevator.
Lieutenant Barnes, Travis, and Sherry followed Brian into the cab, packing the small interior.
“It only makes one other stop,” Debbie said, pointing to a second palm reader on the inside of the elevator.
“Here’s to hoping,” Sherry said, repeating Travis’s tactic with the reader on the wall.
The doors closed and the elevator jerked as it began its descent.
“Express elevator to hell, going down,” Brian said, trying to lessen the tension in the group.
His effort went unrewarded.
7
Snorting, Buck Travers shook himself awake.
There was a small stream of blood running from his mouth and nose, but he wasn’t aware of it.
The only thing he saw was the string of indecipherable characters scrawled across the computer screen.
Damn it all to hell! He must have passed out as he pressed the first letter, and his limp hand fell nervelessly on a dozen other keys before falling off the keyboard. Now he’d have to erase it all and start over.
Lifting his hand from where it lay in his lap took a monumental effort, and once he’d gotten it back on the desk, he just stared at it stupidly, as if unaware what he was supposed to do with it.
Thankfully, the pain in his chest had faded significantly, so his next coughing fit didn’t hurt as bad. The flow of blood coming out of his mouth increased with each cough. Buck was vaguely aware of a small puddle of crimson liquid soaking into the carpet beneath the chair.
Forcing his arm to obey, he reached up and laid a finger on the BACKSPACE key, watching as the characters removed themselves, disappearing from the screen until all that remained was the flashing vertical line of the cursor.
He knew the instructions above the text box should read “Enter Subject Code,” but he couldn’t focus his eyes well enough to understand the words.
Oh well, he’d used a keyboard enough that he should be able to enter the code by feel. At least, he used to be able to do that, before someone disconnected his hand from his brain.
Stupid hand! Buck thought vehemently, coughing up what felt like a water balloon worth of blood.
He risked a look down at his feet and had to fight against a wave of nausea and fear.
All that blood! It couldn’t possibly be his! No one had that much blood inside of them.
He looked back to see his hand poised expectantly over the X key, as if waiting on his mind to give it the order to execute.
What a good word, he thought.
Smiling around a mouthful of blood, Agent Travers pressed the X key, watching as the letter appeared on the screen, though it was nothing more than a blur. His hand seemed better now, more willing to cooperate.
Everything was supposed to cooperate with him. That was the natural order.
He moved his hand to the next character, the number 2, which he pressed twice.
What did the 22 mean?
Oh well, it must be something important. It had to be. He was suffering too much pain for it not to be important.
And all he needed were two more characters, the order to kill. He remembered that much.
Coughing, Agent Travers depressed the X key again, then the letter C, finishing the command.
The command to kill Travis, yes, that was it.
His hand fell nervelessly on the ENTER key, which made the screen blink for a moment. The command was transmitted from the terminal to the mainframe, which processed all data requests pertaining to the subjects, then through various servers to a radio antenna sitting atop the building. The antenna shot the signal out into space, to a satellite just waiting to broadcast it all over the world. Wherever the bastard was, he’d be dead within seconds.
Agent Travers laughed, then passed out again.
8
The agent had no way of knowing Travis’s micro-death receiver had been removed from his heart during Sherry’s healing. Having worked its way through the biological waste machinery of Travis’s body, it now resided in the waste processing tanks of the City of Chicago. It was deposited after Travis paid a visit to the bathroom before leaving the Dougherty house. Though a marvel of micro-engineering, the payload of acid it carried was instantly diffused by the thousands of gallons of water and bodily waste surrounding it.
9
The first of the rooms looked like a well-appointed surgical suite. An oversized surgical table dominated the center of the room. There were leather straps dangling from multiple locations, perfect for securing head, chest, arms, and legs. Along the right wall were two stainless steel cabinets. One looked like a crash cart, with the requisite Lifepac defibrillator riding on top. The other was a mystery, though imagination filled the drawers with everything from surgical tools to torture devices. The left side of the room featured a long counter on which lay several stainless-steel trays covered with blue sterile cloths. Quietly, understanding the trepidation Travis and Sherry must be feeling, Debbie informed the group that the cloths covered an orderly arrangement of surgical hand tools: scalpels, clamps, and syringes.
Above the table was a set of lights set in a circular housing mounted on a swinging arm. The center of the housing featured a large magnifying glass, which would provide a brilliantly lit and magnified field of operation. Other equipment bracketed the table near the head of the bed, so that vital signs and heart function could be monitored. Set slightly away from the table, backed up against the far wall, was a portable ultrasound machine, a ventilator, and what appeared to be an Alaris intravenous pump tree.
That’s where— Sherry began, unable to finish.
Yeah, probably, Travis agreed.
“That window you’re looking through is a two-way mirror,” Debbie informed them. “From inside the room, it looks like a regular mirror.”
“And from out here you can see everything,” Brian remarked.
Jesus, they treated us like animals! Travis said, outraged. Or like criminals.
That’s why we’re here now, Sherry said softly.
“Where’s the brain?” Travis asked softly.
Mutely, Debbie pointed farther down the hallway.
They passed the second surgical suite, which had identical equipment, though some of the tables were in different locations.
Approaching the third room, Debbie said, “I need to get in there.” When Travis turned a suspicious gaze on her, she added, “Not everything in this place is bad. Doctor Walls has been working on a recombinant virus that shows great promise in cancer treatment. He asked me to retrieve his samples.”
“You go on then,” Lieutenant Barnes said. “I’ll stay with Travis and Sherry.”
“This looks like a good place to keep an eye on our backtrail,” Brian said, positioning himself outside the lab door. “I’m still close enough to the elevator that I couldn’t miss anyone inside unless I tried to.” As he spoke, he ejected the magazine from his Glock, sticking it into his pants pocket and replacing it with a full one. “By the way, where’s this other hallway go?”
Debbie shrugged. “It wasn’t here before.”
“Might explain how they were able to get subjects in without going through the front door the last few months,” Brian said.
“It also might give us a way out once stuff starts burning down here,” Travis said, his voice harsh.
“Is there anymore of the moon stuff in there?” Sherry asked, indicating the lab.
“The reports claim the last o
f it was used months ago,” Lieutenant Barnes answered.
“I can check, while I’m in there,” Debbie said. “If you’ll open the doors for me.”
“I’m going to scout ahead,” the lieutenant said.
Travis nodded, concentrating on the palm reader. The lab door slid open a second later, letting out a puff of pressurized air. Debbie moved into the room, passing powered down workstations and hulking laboratory equipment. Though not large by industrial standards, the room held an amazing array of equipment, including two free-standing PCR workstations, a pipettor, a reagent dispenser, several tabletop microscopes, a small centrifuge, a WPA Spectrophotometer, a homogenizer, and dozens of smaller instruments. Little orange lights shone on the larger pieces; they weren’t unplugged and collecting dust. They remained powered up but in a standby mode.
“You know,” she said, moving through the room to the large freezer-style doors at the back, “any of the workstations in here can access the mainframe.”
“That isn’t what we came to do,” Travis said matter-of-factly. “I want to see the mainframe and the servers.”
And then we can put a stop to this, Sherry said.
“Guys,” Lieutenant Barnes’ voice floated down the hall outside the lab. “Come get this last door open. There’s someone in there.”
Still holding hands, Travis and Sherry left Debbie by the freezer and walked toward the computer room.
10
Agent Travers woke himself with another snort, sending a gout of blood flying almost to the edge of the keyboard.
Got to watch that, he thought. Can’t afford to short the system out.
A voice came from outside the terminal room. A shadow moved across the frosted glass of the door. The voice sounded familiar, but Travers couldn’t place it.
He vaguely remembered entering Travis’s kill-code, and the thought of the young man falling dead in his tracks almost brought a laugh that would have started another coughing fit.