Flesh Blood Steel

by David Jones

  Anya’s eyebrows knit. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m linked to Cymobius’s network.”

  Anya pulled up a blueprint of the detention area, focused it on the elevator shaft. “He’s right.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Moore said. “How are we supposed to take on thirty guards while we’re hanging from a ladder? We’d be so much target practice for their guys.”

  “I can do it,” Jake said, his mind whirring through scenarios even as he spoke.

  Everyone stared at him like he had just said he wanted to drink arsenic.

  “I don’t know if losing your memory also means losing your sanity, but let me clue you in on something,” Moore said. “Being a cybrid doesn’t make you indestructible. You’d think all that blood on your shirt would have clued you in.”

  “I don’t have to take on all the guards,” Jake said. “The little office up there is too small to fit more than maybe five. The rest are outside. The building’s doorway makes a perfect choke point. The ones outside won’t be able to target me without hitting one of their own. And while I’m dealing with the inside guys, you set up to take the rest.”

  “That’s a bad idea,” Rudd said.

  “Throw him in a cell,” Moore said, gesturing at a couple of his people. “I don’t want to hear his voice anymore.”

  Rudd refused to stand. The guards were forced to lift him by his tac harness and manhandle him into an empty cell.

  “The longer we wait, the more time they have to plan,” Jake said. “If we want to get out of here alive, we need to move now.”

  “You sure you’re up for this?” Moore asked.

  “I think I have to be.”

  Moore stood silent for 8.5 seconds rubbing his whiskered chin. Then he nodded. “Get that door open,” he said, pointing at three of his people, one of whom was Anya’s brother, Calvin.

  “You’re still hurt,” Anya said.

  “I’m healing fast.” Jake lifted his shirt. Puckered pink flesh surrounded the spots where Bixby had stabbed him, but the wounds were closed. He could get used to this.

  “That’s incredible.” Anya bent forward for a better look.

  “Yeah, but it costs,” Jake said. “Is there any food back there? My hands are shaking.”

  Anya scooted her chair back, scanned under the desk. “There’s a mini-fridge.” She came up with two insulated lunchboxes.

  Despite being zipped tight, Jake could smell the unmistakable aroma of corn beef and cabbage wafting from the box on the right. His throat tightened, his mouth watered, and his knees went weak.

  “Whoa.” Calvin, who had finished opening the elevator doors and returned to stand near his sister, lunged to catch Jake before he could topple over.

  “Sorry,” Jake muttered. He couldn’t take his eyes off the lunchboxes.

  Anya hustled around the desk, unzipping them as she came. “Lean him against the wall there.”

  It took only 12.7 seconds for Jake to get his first bite of corn beef, but it felt like a year. Under any other circumstances he would have felt self-conscious with a gaggle of strangers watching him scarf a stolen lunch, but pain and ravenous hunger have no pride. Jake shoved food into his mouth until there was none left. A Ziploc containing three large chocolate chip cookies went next followed by a handful of macadamia nuts and two bottled waters.

  The second lunchbox contained two BLT sandwiches on toasted bread. Jake dispatched those with as much gusto as he had the corn beef. An apple and a banana followed suit.

  “Better?” Anya asked.

  Jake nodded. He could feel his body burning the calories as fast as it could metabolize them. He stood. He was still hungry, but he felt stronger, more focused.

  “If we’re getting out of here, we’d better do it soon,” Moore said. The big man hadn’t complained about Jake’s meal. It must have been plain that Jake was too weak to go fighting a small army of Cymobius guards in his former state. But Moore’s body language said he was antsy.

  “I’m ready,” Jake said.

  “Are we bringing Rudd with us?” Anya asked.

  Moore shook his head. “As much as I’d like to, there’s no way we could haul him up a ladder in an elevator shaft. Besides, even if we gaged him, he’d ruin our chance at surprising those guys top side. We need to move quietly.” He turned to Jake. “Lead the way, kid.”

  Jake swiped a flashlight from the security desk and headed for the elevator. Nervous energy put a bounce in his step. That, and an ample supply of fear. Was he insane? What if some rogue Cymobius guard started spraying bullets down the shaft while he was climbing?

  But what choice did he have? It wasn’t like anyone else had a better shot at clearing the way. And he refused to sit down here waiting for some Cymobius thugs to gas him. Better to go down fighting to escape than to sit and wait patiently for death to come calling.

  Musty air wafted from the open elevator shaft. Jake shone his flashlight into it. Raw stone outfitted with an iron latticework of support beams filled the space. The bottom of the elevator’s single car glinted about three stories up, all dull gray metal and rusty bolts. On the back wall, fitted snuggly into place next to what must have been the counterbalance shaft, a line of handholds rose into the gloom.

  Jake checked the safety on his handgun then stuffed it into the waistband of his pants. Calvin started to hand him a rifle, but Jake shook his head. “Too bulky,” he said. “The guys up there have plenty of these if I need one.”

  Calvin grinned.

  They climbed in silence, but their footfalls and even the soft clap-clap of their palms on the rungs echoed in the stone shaft. Jake went first. As he neared the elevator car, he became aware of an unnatural silence entombing it. At first he panicked. He had forgotten to check the computer for any escape hatches that might give Oliver a way out. You always had those in the movies. But no, this car had none. Probably it was another security feature of the Cymobius detention area. Whoever had designed this place hadn’t given two cents about fire safety and poured their design talents into preventing escape. It would be a shame to have a prisoner get trapped in the elevator during an escape attempt only to climb out the top.

  A sudden boom inside the elevator car made Jake jump. He almost lost his foothold on the ladder.

  “Harris!” Oliver shouted from inside. By the sound, Jake guessed she was slamming the butt of a rifle against the car’s wall. “I hear you, Harris!”

  Jake kept climbing. Even if Oliver was stronger than Jake, and he feared she might be, there was no way she could escape the elevator. Its walls were made from the same steel that encased the cell blocks below, and they were nearly as thick as the cell doors. That was comforting. Too bad she was smart enough not to squeeze off a few rounds, no doubt realizing as Jake had in the corridor that the bullets would only bounce.

  Jake climbed on.

  Some of Moore’s people, including Calvin, began to flag after five minutes of continuous climbing. They fell farther and farther behind Jake as he monotonously ascended into the darkness, his muscles only slightly fatigued.

  It was better this way. If stray bullets came whizzing into the shaft, Jake didn’t want any of them getting hit. He had no idea what configuration the troops up top might be maintaining, and therefore no real way to plan for it. His best option was probably to wade in and deal with what he found. Of course, the elevator door made that prospect much deadlier. It wasn’t like he could surprise anyone since he would have to pry the doors open first.

  Jake froze on the ladder, his mind whirling with a sudden idea. He signaled to Moore, who was maybe ten feet below him to stop climbing. Jake moved down closer to him so they could speak quietly.

  “Where is Anya?” Jake asked.

  Moore shrugged. He passed the word down the line. A minute passed, and then Anya was there, climbing past the others who could just make way for her. With his massive shoulders, Moore really couldn’t move far enough aside even to accommodate a petite young woman of A
nya’s size, but he did his best, giving her a hand and an impressive lift so that she could reach Jake.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I need your voice,” Jake said.

  “My what?”

  “You sound a little like Oliver.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Jake shook his head. “I need you to act like her, tell the guys up there to open the doors.”

  Anya eyed the access doors above them and frowned. “I don’t know why they haven’t already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If someone was holding my people down here, I would open the shaft and keep an eye on things. If I saw somebody crawling up, and it wasn’t one of mine, I’d drop them.”

  Why hadn’t Jake thought of that? He glanced at the doorway as well, feeling sheepish. He shrugged in lieu of saying something stupid and uninformed.

  “Must be another protocol,” Anya whispered. “We do have you to consider after all. Maybe they’re to keep the door shut until Oliver gives the all clear rather than offering you an open invitation to climb up.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jake said. “Either way, we’ve got to get it open. Think you can mimic Oliver?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a door between you and them, and you’re going to be a story below their level. They won’t know the difference.”

  “Fine. I’ll do anything if it gets me off this stupid ladder. My arms are getting tired.”

  Jake passed the plan to Moore who nodded in agreement and passed it lower. That done, Jake and Anya climbed as stealthily as possible up the shaft. Jake eased his way across a support beam to a spot opposite the door where he crouched in the dark. Anya remained on the ladder about a story down as ordered. He gave her a thumbs up.

  “Hey!” she shouted in a surprisingly commanding voice. “It’s Oliver, open these doors.”

  A pause, then a muted voice from outside, “We can’t do that ma’am.”

  Anya hurried up the ladder, a storm cloud of anger writ on her face.

  Jake motioned for her to stay where she was, but Anya paid him no attention. She was really getting into the role.

  She slapped the door with the flat of one hand. “If you make me open this door while I’m swinging from a ladder so help me I will kill every one of you. Open these godforsaken doors now!”

  Another pause. Jake gave Anya a thumbs up. She shrugged. And the doors split open.

  Daylight shone into the shaft. Jake hadn’t thought of that. He really needed to learn how to plan better. Whereas he had imagined leaping from the dark onto unsuspecting security personnel, he found himself spotlighted by sultry evening light, a perfect target and nearly blind.

  Fortunately, the two men in the doorway were peering down, probably just realizing that the young black woman below them certainly was not Oliver and that they, together, had likely just made the biggest mistake of their careers, possibly their lives.

  Jake launched himself through the open elevator doors and into the men, neither of whom saw him coming. They crashed into a small desk in a tangle of limbs and weapons.

  Two more men and a woman—Weed, who had given Jake a hard time on his trip down—stood in the room. One of the men cursed, and all three lifted their rifles.

  Jake grabbed the men he had pummeled by their tactical harnesses and spun like an Olympic hammer thrower. They crashed into their fellows with a sound like steers driven into a wall, and the whole group fetched up against the room’s doorway, which was open. Weed rolled out, nimble as a flea, to land on her feet, but the men piled up.

  Beyond them, Jake glimpsed the rest of their force, a disciplined cadre of mixed men and women stationed at staggered points facing the entrance. They were positioned so as to leave clear firing lanes for a dedicated kill zone right where Jake stood.

  The new speed of Jake’s thoughts left him some time to ponder just what he had been thinking when he formed this brilliant plan. He was going to wing it? In the face of thirty armed men and women? He was shaking again. The cybrid part of his brain was sending him little love notes in the form of cataloged ills. Highest among these was the fact that he had lost too much blood to go exerting himself in life-and-death struggles just now.

  As if he had any choice.

  “Stay where you are,” called a woman from the group outside. She was near the center in a crouching sniper position, rifle tracked on Jake center mass.

  Two of the guys Jake had thrown were starting to rouse. One of them reached for a sidearm. Jake caught his wrist, twisted the gun from his grip, and jabbed it into the side of his neck. He froze, as did the man beneath him.

  “Stand up,” Jake said. He sounded far more confident than he felt. He nodded at the other two men just now rising from where he had chucked them against the doorway. “Both of you, face me, backs to your buddies out there. Fill the doorway. Now, one at a time, put your weapons on the floor.”

  They did as he commanded. Both men looked sullen, and prepared to attack at the first opportunity. But their faces told another story as well. Neither of them had been in this sort of situation before, and though they may have trained for it, they were scared, both for their own sakes and that of their buddy. They weren’t callous enough to make a move against Jake while he had a gun trained on their friend’s neck.

  A soft clangor behind him told Jake that Anya had climbed out of the shaft with Moore right behind her. The rest of the rebels hung back, probably awaiting Moore’s orders.

  “Now what, Hannibal?” Moore asked as a couple of his people set about retrieving the guns and knives from the floor. “You’ve got us in a standoff.” He peered around the two men blocking the entrance and gave a low whistle.

  “Now this,” Anya said. She had taken a seat at the small room’s single computer terminal and was busily clicking her way through a succession of screens. And she was smiling. It was a particularly fearsome smile.

  A collective grunt of pain erupted from the soldiers outside. Several cursed, and most dropped their weapons. It looked like they were having some sort of synchronized seizure. They writhed on the ground, clutching their heads, moaning, and shaking.

  This went on for five seconds before they all fell still. Anya keyed something on the pad, and though there had been no discernable sound, Jake became suddenly aware of a tingling in the air that had been there only seconds ago and was now gone.

  “Microwave emitter on top of this place,” Anya said by way of explanation. “Pretty effective at causing blackouts, but it won’t last. Let’s go.”

  “What about these guys?” Jake asked.

  “Kill them,” Moore said as he shoved the three in the doorway out of the room, making way for his people.

  “No!” Jake pushed his captive out the door, following in Moore’s wake as Anya and the others surrounded them amidst the unconscious soldiers.

  Jake faced Moore. The guy was huge, intimidating. It was like trying to stare down a bull. “You’re not going to murder these men. We can tie them up. They’ve got zip tie restraints.”

  “No time,” Moore said.

  Jake looked at his former captives. “You want to live? One of you cuff the other three, I’ll cuff the fourth.”

  In the face of eight armed rebels the choice was clear. The men complied. Jake made short work of securing the fourth man’s wrists and ankles. It took less than a minute.

  Moore made no comment during this procedure, but looked on in disgust. He turned to Anya. “We need a ride out of here.”

  She had detached a computer pad from inside and stood now staring at it, nodding. “Let’s go out the way we came in. There’s an armored truck in that garage.” She pointed at a building twenty meters from where they stood.

  “What about him?” Moore asked, indicating Jake.

  “What about me?” Jake asked.

  “He’s with us,” Anya said. She grabbed Calvin by the coat sleeve, pulled him next to her. “We’re responsible for him.”
/>
  “You’re liable for him,” Moore said.

  Anya nodded, her eyes serious. “You won’t be sorry.”

  Chapter 10

  Confirmation

  The armored truck groaned along Cymobius Incorporated’s divided entranceway, Moore at the wheel. They were doing better than fifty miles per hour which, given the truck’s top heavy design, seemed excessive to Jake.

  He sat in back on a bench next to Calvin. They had no windows, but Jake could see a commercial truck and two vans all bearing the Cymobius logo in the passenger side mirror tailing them. Bullets pinged off the armored truck’s reinforced frame.

  “What about the gates?” Moore asked.

  Anya, who sat next to him in the passenger seat, consulted her tablet. “Closed, but I’ve got control. I’ll open them when we get near.”

  “Open them now.”

  “If I do that they’ll find some other way to block the road. This way they think they’ve got us bottled in.”

  “Fine,” Moore said, as he swerved to strike the pickup, which had pulled up beside them. His lips peeled back in a smile as the smaller vehicle fishtailed into the curb and flipped over with a jarring series of thumps and glass-shattering screams of rending metal.

  More gunshots. Jake winced. Despite his cybrid’s constant barrage of information about the tactical situation, he found his mind turning again and again to home.

  His mother was dead.

  He couldn’t seem to wrap his thoughts around that concept. Jake was alone in the world—surrounded by armed killers, and very much alone.

  “Where are the cops in all this?” he asked Calvin.

  “Cymobius doesn’t call the cops,” Calvin said. “They have their own. You know, the guys shooting at us right now.”

  “That’s insane,” Jake said.

  “It’s private property. All this is sovereign land owned by the company.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t go shooting at people, even on private property. And for that matter, how can they get away with throwing people in cells? That’s not legal.”