by Logan Jacobs
Tempest winced and held up her hand to shield her eyes. “Is that the sunset that John Wayne won’t be walking off into with Grace Kelly?”
“That’s Gary Cooper, asshole,” PoLarr quoted back.
“Alright, so John Wayne walks off into the sunset with Gary Cooper.” Tempest shrugged. “It’s still getting in my eyes. This planet needs an ozone tune-up real bad.”
“Say, Tempest. How’d Die Hard strike you the first time you watched it without knowing about Earth culture?” I asked. “Honest opinion.”
“It was a fun romp. I didn’t get the thing with the last names, but I figured that had something to do with your planet’s weird jealousy issues. Why?”
“Just wondering if the Skalle Furia and I have unnervingly similar taste in movies,” I said.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” PoLarr said, “but I get the impression that Die Hard is a pretty popular movie franchise on Earth.”
“Yep, whenever someone decides to publish a listicle about the best action movies of all time, it’s pretty much always on there,” I said.
“So it’s not surprising that the Skalle Furia like it too, right?” PoLarr asked. “Especially now that Earth culture is getting popular.”
“And because those terrorists are slick as hell even if they are the bad guys,” Tempest added.
“You think it’s just as simple as that?” I asked. “The Skalle Furia thought Die Hard was super cool, so they decided to copy Hans Gruber a little?”
“I can believe it,” Aurora said. “Terrorists and types like that will copy anything that looks like it’s strong, even if the context ain’t in favor of that strength used that way.”
“Is there another reason to choose this tower as a lair?” Nova asked. “It doesn’t seem very different from the other towers around it, unless I’m missing something.”
“Yeah, the Fox company decided to design their corporate building as a location to shoot movies,” I said. “Really clever, financially speaking, but I don’t exactly think that the Skalle Furia looked for the best deal to rent out an office building for a day of terrorism.”
“It’s possible that the princess happened to be in the area, and the building was the most convenient place to take her,” Nova suggested.
I checked the iPhone. “Two hours left. We gotta move.”
We made it to a row of bushes that hid the Plaza’s brick-paved circular drive from the street and settled behind the shrubbery to assess the situation. From a distance, nothing looked out of the ordinary for a large office tower. Cars drove in and out of the parking lot. A valet leaned against the side of the building and puffed smoke into the air. No sirens, no gunshots, not even a suspicious number of black SUVs. The Skalle Furia could still be hiding anywhere, lurking in hidden nooks to snipe at us.
“All right,” I said. “I figure we go in, act natural, see what we can see, and get to the top floor as fast as we can. We pretend we’re tourists with a thing for 80s action movies?”
“That’s not a hard cover story for you to maintain,” PoLarr said.
“Stealth is best, if we can manage it,” Olivia agreed.
Thomas shook his head. “We’re packing too much hardware to be inconspicuous. We’d have to ditch the big guns.”
“No thanks,” Tempest said. “Those kill the bad guys the fastest.”
“We can’t just storm a peaceful palace,” Nova said, “we’ll harm innocent people who aren’t prepared to fight.”
“So we come in all peaceful, but show ‘em we can take ‘em down if we need to?” suggested Aurora.
“I think it’s what we’ll have to do,” I agreed.
Nobody stopped us from getting into the lobby. The valet taking a smoke break didn’t even glance at us, so I started to wonder if the informant had been a red herring, or maybe a fuschia herring. The Skalle didn’t seem averse to dying for the glorious cause, but our deceased faux-barista hadn’t had the ring of subterfuge about him. But that might only mean that none of us had caught it.
The big faux stone and wood desk that sat in the lobby was still there. The only difference was that it didn’t sport the brass Nakatomi Plaza logo from the movie. I told myself once again that I was in a real place, one that people worked in and walked through without ever wondering if they were about to walk into the start of an action movie.
The receptionist behind the desk looked like Portia de Rossi, with her blonde hair in a ponytail. She had a phone squashed between her tilted head and the shoulder of her cream-colored blazer, her eyes on the screen of the computer in front of her.
“So where’s the party?” I heard her ask as we advanced across the lobby. “Because if it’s in the Valley...Hold on a second.” She looked up at us, and her eyes widened. Her phone dropped from her shoulder as she stood up and shoved her chair back.
I went for my Glock just in case she was about to draw her own weapon, but she stumbled backwards with a high, piercing shriek. She tripped over the chair and disappeared from sight. A moment later, I saw her scuttle out from behind the desk on her hands and knees and booking it across the lobby.
“Aw,” I complained, “I wanted the Hollywood tour.”
There wasn’t anyone else in the lobby, and I didn’t see anyone else as we moved through the corridors to the elevator.
“Hey, since we’re going straight to the top, we can use the express elevator,” I realized. “Same one John McClane used. This is the best rescue mission ever.”
“It’s had its high points,” Thomas agreed.
We made it to the express elevator. Green numbers lit up above a closed elevator door. Thirty-five, then thirty-four.
Nova frowned as we waited for the elevator. “This has been easier than I expected,” she remarked. “What if we’re walking into a trap?”
“They’re either going to ambush us when we try to get into the elevator, or when we try to get out of the elevator,” Thomas said. “Not a lot of options.”
“And we’ll be ready,” PoLarr remarked as she unholstered her rifle.
I drew my rifle and held it at the ready. “Yeah, we’re walking into a trap--for them.”
My mind kept playing a scene from a movie, but it wasn’t anything from the Die Hard franchise, it was the scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier where our hero gets into an elevator brimming with Hydra agents. Adrenaline was pumping into my bloodstream so hard I wondered if I was just going to tip right over into a panic attack. I knew that when the elevator door opened, it would be full of Skalle Furia ready to open fire.
A cheerful dinging sound heralded the arrival of the elevator on the first floor. The silvery doors opened to reveal a completely empty chamber with absolutely no guns, masks, or aliens in it whatsoever.
“Now I know what a TV dinner feels like,” PoLarr remarked as the elevator crawled upward. She nudged me gently in the side. “Nothing? Are you feeling okay?”
“Must have been something I ate,” I replied as I caught her hand and squeezed it.
The over brewed coffee I’d chugged earlier wasn’t doing my guts any favors and the smooth jazz elevator music version of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan” that was playing wasn’t helping my stomach either, but part of me couldn’t stop wondering how many people were at work in the tower today who weren’t secretly alien terrorists or their lackeys. The part of me that was nauseated at the thought that innocent members of the entertainment industry might die on my watch warred with my desire to rappel down a tower with a beautiful woman in my arms while the world exploded inches behind me.
The elevator dinged and stopped, but the doors didn’t open. There was a pop, a bang, and a shower of sparks from above our heads, and then the floor dropped out from under my shoes. We were trapped in an elevator in freefall, and we wouldn’t stop for another five hundred feet.
Chapter Twelve
We were trapped in a falling elevator and about to plummet to our deaths, but we had thirty-five floors to go before we were
out of options.
The lights flickered, and the cabin shook. Thomas, Olivia, and PoLarr dropped to the floor purposefully, as flat on their backs as they could get in the crowded car. I decided to join them. If there wasn’t anything at the bottom of the shaft, it would minimize my internal damage. If there was something at the bottom of the shaft, it wouldn’t matter much anyway.
Tempest spit out a clone of herself. It curled against Tempest and spread its arms out, protecting her from the inevitable crash.
I looked over at Nova. Her ability to absorb and release kinetic energy had saved us from messy deaths before, but I didn’t know if she had enough stored up to stop an elevator packed full of people. Her eyes were wide and terrified, and she looked pale in the dim light of the elevator.
My heart dropped along with my stomach. It looked like we all only had a chance of saving ourselves in the crash.
Aurora flew upwards through my vision like a purple comet. Violet dark matter discs glowed underneath her feet. Her delicate hands pressed flat against the ceiling of the elevator in a Superman-stopping-a-train pose. Metal screeched against metal, material stress against material stress. The cabin was slowing down, but without seeing the numbers flashing past it was hard to tell how many floors we had to go. If we were slowing enough not to die.
“Hold on tight, sugars,” Aurora declared. “I got this.”
Something slammed into my head. It wasn’t like getting hit with a brick or a fist. It was like getting hit by an enormous silk pillow filled with Jell-O. I reeled and lost my grip on my rifle as my body curled protectively against the blow, but the world only spun around me for a second before my eyes and my stomach adjusted to the situation.
Aurora’s dark purple hair streamed behind her, and her eyes glowed purple even through her human disguise. The elevator was gone. We were all surrounded by a violet half-sphere, picking ourselves up from a violet floor. I didn’t understand why Aurora was still holding us until I realized that the pink and purple oil-slick patterns moving over the surface of the sphere meant. We were seeing an explosion from the inside, and Aurora’s dark matter shield was keeping us from being incinerated.
The flames were taking forever to die down, or that might have been the slow-motion vision brought on by the adrenaline surge. I forced air into my lungs and my hand to my gun holster. I didn’t know how long Aurora would be able to hold the shield, but it wouldn’t be forever, and I wanted to meet any Skalle Furia with a hail of bullets.
My team had the same idea. PoLarr and Nova closed ranks in front of Aurora, prepared to protect her when the shields fell. Thomas and I took point. Olivia drew her gun and hovered behind Thomas, hiding her readiness to fire. From behind me, I heard the sound of a gun cocking. It was Tempest. She’d taken the suppressor off her rifle and was ready to do what she did best. Unfortunately, she was the only one of our team who’d managed to keep a grip on her rifle.
Aurora’s shield was thinning, and I could see a jumble of rectangles through the violet flames. The explosion had to be dying down. The rectangles resolved into the familiar shapes of fluorescent lights, concrete pillars, parking spaces, and cars.
“Can’t... hold…” Aurora murmured. The purple glow went out of her eyes.
I ran to catch her as her knees folded. She felt lighter than usual, as though the dark matter shield had physically taken something out of her. Maybe it had. I didn’t really know just how her powers worked.
“You’re going to be okay,” I promised her. “We’ll get you a snack.” Her eyelids fluttered, and she moaned softly.
“I’ve got her,” Nova said. She slid an arm under Aurora’s pale body. My knight had her own kind of armor that glowed from within instead of shining.
I didn’t want to let Aurora go, but I knew we’d move more easily and that she’d be safest in Nova’s arms.
We moved out of the burning elevator, and our shoes crunched over the concrete rubble that had been thrown around during the explosion.
There were still no Skalle in sight.
My mind raced. They’d rigged the right elevator cable to snap with the push of a button, and they’d clearly placed explosives in the bottom of the elevator shaft to polish us off just in case the fall hadn’t done the trick.
We had to be walking into an ambush.
Skalle Furia soldiers and snipers could be hidden anywhere, waiting for us to let down our guard just enough to have the advantage of surprise.
I took stock of the area. The parking garage was full of black SUVs in different makes and models. Not all of them looked like Skalle cars. Most of them had personal touches like bumper stickers, bike racks, bobbleheads in the back window...and alarms going off, singing in tune with the fire alarms placed all around the garage. Most of the windows were black-tinted. I couldn’t see any bodies moving around inside the cars, even if they were packed full of Skalle Furia.
There was just one vehicle that didn’t fit in. A black Pacific Courier truck sat square and squat among the sleek SUVs. It was identical to the truck Hans Gruber’s baddies hid in during Die Hard, so either it was another deliberate reference by the Skalle Furia or the Pacific Courier company hadn’t changed their logo for three decades.
I grinned, pointed to the truck, and then reached to draw my AR-15. “It’s the truck from the movie,” I said. “C’mon, before they get us.”
PoLarr shook her head. “Too obvious,” she mouthed. “Don’t shoot.” I glanced behind me and saw Tempest nodding.
“I get it,” Thomas said. “The waiting’s worse than the action sometimes. But there're no bullets in the air right now, and I’m fine with that.”
Aurora cocked her side to one side. She held her finger to her lips in a “shh” gesture.
I could hear the faint sound of squeaks as they came toward us. It sounded like two sets of feet, and it sounded like two people who knew how to be quiet but had on shoes that didn’t make being quiet very easy.
Aurora rubbed her belly in an exaggerated “I’m hungry” motion and licked her lips saucily.
I waved at her in a “go on, why don’t you” gesture.
Aurora winked at me with her tongue between her teeth and started to sneak toward the source of the steps.
We followed Aurora to her prey. I used each big SUV as cover, and I saw the rest of the team duck and dash ably between cars.
I kept track of Aurora until we reached the last line of cars before the concrete wall, and Aurora disappeared with a slight shimmer. I took cover behind a car.
Aurora’s target, and the source of the squeaky steps, was a pair of security guards dressed in beige uniforms. I aimed at the pair of guards and put my finger on the trigger.
One of the guards brought his walkie-talkie up to his mouth. “North wing of the parking garage looks clear,” he reported. “Nobody here but us chickens.”
“You callin’ me chicken?” the other guard asked.
The guard with the walkie-talkie opened his mouth to speak, but his eyes rolled up in his head. I saw a flash of blue as his knees buckled, and the next sound from him was the sound of the walkie-talkie as it clattered onto the concrete floor.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the walkie-talkie skitter across the floor. It came to a stop by Tempest, and she scooped it up quickly.
The other guard drew his pistol and looked around frantically for his companion’s attacker. He aimed the pistol where his partner had stood, but the pistol was gone from his hand before he could find anything solid to aim at.
Nova slammed the guard against the wall.
The guard’s eyes bugged out. “Please,” he gasped, “my job isn’t worth this.”
“We gotta get out of this parking structure,” I said. “Elevator’s out, obviously. Hey buddy, tell us where the stairs are, and we might let you live.”
“Right...right by the elevator.” The guard pointed to a pile of twisted metal.
“Stairs are out too,” Tempest observed. She thumbed one of the button
s on the side of the walkie-talkie. An orange ray shot out and left a scorch mark on the concrete wall right behind the guard’s head. The top of his hat now sported a neat circular hole. A little wisp of smoke rose up from the hole and dissipated into the air. “Whoops, that was close. Any other back ways out of here?”
“Not that my staff don’t know about,” the guard wheezed.
I scanned the parking garage again, looking for any signs I’d missed before that might give us a clue as to where to go to evade the security guards.
My eyes skipped past the defibrillator station on the wall and focused in on a familiar zigzag line set at right angles. After spending the past few months in an alien city filled with signs and ideograms of every shape and size, it was almost a little weird to be surrounded by visual shorthand I could instinctively recognize.
“Stairs over there, guys.” I gestured in the direction of the sign and tried to contain my excitement. We were going to be running up the same dingy, fluorescent-lit back stairs as John McClane.
“They’re heading for the--” I heard the guard say.
I turned to see the guard with his walkie-talkie to his mouth. His cold eyes were fixed on me. I didn’t see which one of my teammates made the shot, but his head disappeared in a gory mist the moment the words left his mouth.
The echoes of the shot had barely faded away when soft clicking sounds erupted from all over the parking garage. The alarms going off around the garage hadn’t bothered me before, because I could still hear my teammates clearly. My Combat Awareness mod undoubtedly had a hand in that. But the chorus of clicks seemed to come from everywhere, melding with the singing sirens and bouncing off the walls.
Car doors opened in a coordinated chorus. Boots hit the floor. Guns cocked. I could hear all of these things, but the cars were packed so close together that it was hard to see beyond the first few rows in front of your face. After that, it was all chrome, bumper stickers, and shiny piano black detailing.
I motioned for everyone to get down. “Crawl under cars. You know where you’re going. We’ll meet at the stairs.”