Grave Makers (Darkside Dreams - Series 1 Book 2)

by A. King Bradley

  Wherever this stairwell went, wherever it ended up, Oscar knew it would lead him to where he needed to be.

  CHAPTER 16

  ◆◆◆

  For a while Lynn held her own against the Unit, but eventually the powerful machine bodyguard finally got a good grip on her and effortlessly hurled her through a pane of bulletproof glass.

  It took a tremendous amount of force to break that material. More than any organic human could withstand. Their organs would rupture, their bones would crack, they'd suffer spinal injuries from whiplash. Lynn crashed through, feeling a thousand different pains as she landed hard on the floor of the enclosure. She sat up, breathing deep, expanding her ribcage to push out any big pieces of glass that had lodged in her torso. Reaching behind her, she felt the shredded meat of her back and the exposed synthetic skeleton beneath. The pain was bad but the anger was worse.

  Lynn stood up and bled, her purplish synthetic fluids leaking from her deep wounds like grape juice. The Unit watched her, waiting. The android had no reason to move, to strike. It had Lynn cornered. The fight was already won.

  Reaching to her bandolier, Lynn depressed a comms button.

  ◆◆◆

  "Grave Maker, come in."

  The signal was choppy this far underground. Oscar immediately stopped and ascended a level.

  "Copy," he said.

  "I can't beat her… she’s too strong… I'm going to have to use the EMP."

  "No," Oscar said quickly. "Just keep fighting. The EMP will kill you anyway! You might as well try."

  "This is the only way,” Lynn protested. “If I keep fighting, she'll just break me in half. Then she'll come for you."

  "I'll just have to take care of Greyson before she gets here. I'm pretty far down already."

  "Forget it, Oscar. It's my life. I've been going after the son-of-a-bitch a lot longer than you have. I'm going to have my little victory up here. Suck it up."

  Oscar tried to say something more, but his words fell on deaf ears. Lynn had switched her comms off.

  "Damn it!" Oscar growled. He started climbing again, entertaining the idea of going to help Lynn, but then he realized how stupid that was.

  A moment later, the lights flickered and shut off. She had done it.

  The backup generators quickly flipped on and Oscar was back in business. Feeling empty and cold, he continued down the stairwell. With each level, he felt as though he were sinking deeper and deeper into a darkness he would never escape from. A pall of sorrow suddenly fell over him. Doubts. Fears. Pain. Everything returned. In silence, alone, Oscar moved down the stairwell in more of a controlled fall than an actual jog.

  Finally, he was at the end. No more stairs. Looking to his left, he saw a door marked Sub-level T. That was as far as the place went, for now.

  He twisted the door handle, expecting it to be locked. It wasn't. Oscar strode through and found himself in a sort of locker room. Scrub suits were hung everywhere. Most of them had names. There was a dispenser for paper masks, a series of hooks where face shields and goggles had been hung. Oscar figured he was covered enough, and kept going.

  He soon entered a lab. It was a big space, dark and shadowy, but there was a distant light glowing somewhere. Oscar followed it like a lost sailor, using the compensations of his goggles to avoid crashing into the screens that had been set up around individual workspaces.

  Coming around the edge of a screen, he saw a fully suited man standing by a table, his back turned. It was DeAndre Greyson. The hairnet over the neat beard gave it away. On the table, broken into a hundred pieces, were a series of synthetic body parts. Most synths started life like this, a bunch of pieces put together. But this was not that. This was some sort of sick experiment.

  Oscar took another step to get a better look. With a shock, he saw the head and face of the synth. It was Catalea. Her eyes were closed. Her face completely still… like a doll. She was dead, or as close to it as a synth could get.

  "You bastard," Oscar snarled.

  The man at the table didn't flinch or turn toward him. He just stayed there, fidgeting away with some sort of tool.

  "I figured I’d be seeing you again," he said, voice muffled by the net and mask but otherwise calm. “I didn’t expect you so soon though. And I certainly wouldn’t have guessed you’d make it this far. Color me impressed."

  "I had help," Oscar said, his hand shaking as he raised his weapon.

  “Where is your help now, amigo?” Greyson said just as the lights suddenly shut off.

  Oscar flinched and narrowed his eyes. The smart goggles automatically compensated, and he saw the figure at the table, still standing just as before.

  "Who says I need help?"

  The figure at the table turned, pulling away its mask and net. The face of DeAndre Greyson stared straight at Oscar through the dark, his eyes seeming to glow in the half night vision.

  Without a word, Oscar charged forward to attack. Forget the guns; he wanted blood on his hands. Pulling out his own combat knife, he plunged the blade toward Greyson's throat.

  Surprisingly, the thirty-two-year-old billionaire parried the strike with incredible speed and strength, sending a surge of pain up Oscar’s arm. The knife flew away and crashed to the floor. Oscar reached toward his belt for a pistol. He had it nearly out of its holster before a kick from Greyson sent it away. How was the son of a bitch so good? And how could he see a thing in this darkness?

  Oscar had seemingly lost the upper hand, but it didn’t take long for the veteran hitter to realize that Greyson was far too aggressive in his anticipation of incoming strikes. So, Oscar feinted a swing with his right fist, pulling Greyson's attention toward it. Then he feinted again with his left, making Greyson look back. Then the real strike came, a knee driven up into the bastard's crotch. Greyson hopped backward, trying to recover his stance, but Oscar gave him no time; he flew forward with a vicious right-handed haymaker cocked behind his head, pounding a fist straight into Greyson's face. He felt the nose give way, maybe a few teeth, and Greyson hit the floor hard.

  "It's over, you sick son-of-a-bitch," Oscar said, now firmly gripping his massive revolver with his right hand. "I've got you, and all the money in the world couldn’t stop me from killing you now."

  Greyson flipped over onto his hands and knees and started crawling across the floor. Oscar followed, holding off for now. He was curious to see where the man would go.

  Greyson pushed through a door and entered a small office with a bar. Using a stool for support, he stood up and smiled at Oscar through his ruined smile.

  "Just one last drink," he said. "How about it? Send me out of this world with a belt of cognac, at least."

  Oscar thought for a second, then nodded. As Greyson turned to grab a bottle, Oscar lifted his revolver and shot him through the head.

  The feeling of victory lasted until Oscar saw sparks shooting out of the gaping bullet wound. It was a goddamned android. An early model service droid, if his eyes didn't fail him. Now that the goggles were fully compensated, he could see that the thing's skin looked lumpy and waxy, like modeling clay. It was passable work in the dark, but it must have been done quickly.

  Which meant Greyson was desperate.

  And also that he was still alive down here, probably up to no good.

  Oscar turned and ran out of the office. The lights came back on as he crossed the threshold. He looked around. It was just a normal lab. No one else around. Deserted.

  He turned and went back into the office, having a wild thought. Reaching over the dead droid, he gripped the cognac bottle it had been reaching for and gave it a pull. It tilted but did not come off the bar. A second later, a section of the wall punched out and slid aside.

  Oscar crept into the secret hallway with his revolver at the ready. Rounding a corner, he prepared to shoot. Only he saw nothing, only a light glowing at the far end. He ran toward it and pushed a door open.

  Inside, he saw what Greyson was trying to do. Oscar was hardly educat
ed in the mostly theoretical art of FBC conversion, but he had seen a few blueprints, a few mockups. Greyson was on the other side of a sheet of glass, sitting inside a sealed chamber attached to a huge apparatus. He seemed impatient, gesturing wildly as he spoke to someone over a radio inside his chamber. He had something attached to his head. They were already well into the procedure.

  There were three doctors on Oscar's side of the glass. They turned toward him, shouting. Oscar was far beyond pity by that point; the doctors were unarmed but Oscar still blasted two of them down, sending them to the afterlife within seconds of entering the room. The third doctor put his face to the wall and said nothing. Running forward, Oscar pressed an intercom button on a console.

  "Greyson, can you hear me?" he called.

  Lifting his gun again, he fired twice at the glass separating him from the FBC chamber. It did nothing other than turn his bullets to dust. Turning, Greyson saw a fire extinguisher in the wall. He grabbed it and bashed it continuously against the glass to no avail.

  On the other side, Greyson watched with a look of mild amusement on his face.

  "You're too late," he said, his voice echoing from overhead intercoms. Greyson reached up and tapped his head. "My mind is in here. For now. In a moment it will be in the cloud. I'll be free to be transferred to a cyber body halfway across the country. It was a good try, though! You came closer to killing me than anyone ever has. And that’s saying a lot. For what it’s worth, you should be proud!"

  He laughed. The sound made Oscar's skin crawl.

  Oscar turned and grabbed the surviving doctor by the collar, pulling him toward the console.

  "Stop it!" Oscar growled.

  "Stop what?" the doctor whimpered.

  "The upload! Cancel it!" Oscar roared.

  The doctor licked his lips. "I can't. It can't be canceled. You have to understand, it's—"

  Oscar pulled the trigger and the doctor’s head exploded before he could finish his sentence. Smoke rose from the barrel of Oscar’s revolver as he watched the man’s lifeless body topple to the floor.

  "That man had a family," Greyson called out, surprisingly upset that Oscar had gunned him down.

  "And Catalea had me," Oscar grunted. He picked up a chair and bashed it against the glass with all his might. Again and again, until his shoulders screamed in pain.

  "It’s no use. There’s no way you’re going to break that glass," Greyson remarked, as Oscar fell to his knees in defeat.

  "You sure about that?!" Lynn's voice suddenly called out from somewhere behind Oscar.

  Oscar whipped around to confirm the source of the voice, and there Lynn was, limping into the room with burnt and tattered clothing, with a good quarter of the synthetic flesh on her body torn away. Already the gaps in the skin were covered in a membrane of purplish viscous healing fluid. She didn't look good, not at all, but she was still clinging to life.

  Approaching the glass, she pulled in a deep breath of air and punched straight through it, flaying her fist to the metallic bone. She grabbed the glass with a metal fist and pulled until the whole pane buckled and fell inward.

  Greyson said nothing. He didn't smile or laugh as Lynn walked up to his pod and tore the door off. His face looked quite blank.

  Reaching in, Lynn grabbed the bastard by the neck and lifted him out, tearing wires and leads from his head and spine.

  "I saw Catalea," Lynn snarled. "I saw what he did."

  “Do it,” Oscar said with a nod.

  Lynn twisted her hand. Greyson's neck snapped like a twig. She let him fall to the ground then turned toward Oscar, groaning in pain.

  Suddenly, a familiar and chilling laugh echoed from the intercoms.

  "Like I said, too late," Greyson's voice said.

  Oscar stared at the ceiling, feeling dizzy and defeated. He heard Lynn fall to the floor behind him, too tired to stand.

  "I had no choice, you know," Greyson went on, his mind now obviously speaking to them from the cloud. "Honestly though, I should thank you. Sometimes you need a hard deadline to actually get anything done. After you almost killed me after that talk show, I had no choice but to speed up the timetable. The experience left me feeling so… mortal… And I couldn't just allow myself to continue to live like that. To exist in a form that could so easily be destroyed. There's still so much work left to do."

  "If you think this is the end of it, you’re kidding yourself, Greyson. I’ll find you, you son-of-a-bitch. I’ll find you if it’s the last thing I ever do," Oscar growled as he pulled himself to his feet and glared at Greyson’s lifeless shell of a body.

  "Then perhaps I’ll need to keep you… distracted,” Greyson said curiously.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is about the girl, right? The one on the table?”

  “You bet your ass it is,” Oscar grumbled.

  “Well, in that case you should know that her consciousness remains intact. Like all the others… As for their bodies… well… you saw the table.”

  “Why? Why’d you do it?” Oscar demanded. “Why her?”

  “There was something in her head that I needed to make disappear. Something that didn’t belong there.”

  “What does that mean? What did you do to her?!” Oscar yelled, but his words fell on deaf ears. DeAndre Greyson was gone. Vanished into the data sphere in an instant.

  Oscar and Lynn sat in silence for a long time. Then, at the same time, they realized where they were. What they had done. They had been so wrapped up in trying to stop Greyson, they hadn't thought what their lives would be like if they managed to survive.

  "We need to get out of here before the cops show up," Lynn suggested.

  "More like the FBI," Oscar said, reaching down to help drag Lynn to her feet.

  "We have a couple stops to make before we go," Lynn groaned. "What he said, about those synths and their consciousnesses. I can access his network from here. We should be able to download them all... including Catalea…"

  CHAPTER 17

  ◆◆◆

  Sergeant Brooks walked across the lobby of his apartment building, dragging his feet. He wondered how one man could drink so much coffee and still be dog tired. He stepped into an elevator and road it up, massaging his aching neck as he waited for his floor to ping on the panel in front of him. For a moment, he thought of the pleasure house. He could really go for a massage right now. Nothing more than that. It would be an easy night of work for whatever girl he picked. Probably the one with the strongest looking hands.

  No, Brooks thought. No chance.

  He'd never go back to that place. Not now. Not ever. A stiff drink and a long bath would have to do the trick.

  He tapped his keycard against the apartment door and went inside. As he shut the door, he realized he wasn't alone. Reaching for his sidearm, he crept through into the living room.

  "Hello, Brooks," Oscar said. He was sitting on the sofa, right at home, a glass of cheap whiskey cradled in his hand.

  "Christ, Graves," Brooks sighed, holstering his sidearm. "You scared the hell out of me. I could have shot you, you know that, right?”

  “Probably would have missed. You were always a crap shot,” Oscar quipped, before knocking back the rest of his whiskey.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Oscar? Do you know how many felonies you’re wanted for?"

  "After the second or third one, does it really matter anymore?" Oscar asked.

  "I think it does," Brooks replied. "You know I can't help you, Oscar. I can't keep you here. I should be arresting you right now."

  "But you won't."

  "No, I guess I won't." Brooks sighed again, then grunted as he pulled off his coat and draped it on a chair. "I won’t take you in, Oscar. But I can't let you hide here, either."

  Oscar sat forward, setting his glass down. "I'm not here for refuge, Brooks. In fact, I won't be in your hair for very long at all. I just wanted to tell you, I know the truth."

  Brooks narrowed his eyes. "What ar
e you talking about?"

  "I’m talking about two plus two equaling four,” Oscar said cryptically.

  “Get to the point, Oscar. I haven’t got all night,” Brooks grumbled.

  “It was you, Brooks. You’re the one who put Greyson on Catalea’s trail,” Oscar revealed.

  “And why would I do that?” Brooks protested.

  “To save your case against Greyson, why else? After your star witness disappeared you had incriminating synth memories but no synth to tie them to in court. You said yourself that the memories alone were inadmissible without the actual synth who authored them. So you must have offered Catalea something. Money, protection. Who knows? You’re a resourceful guy though. I’m sure you could have found some way to leverage her. So you found a way to stick those memories in her mind with hopes of her becoming your new star witness and no one being the wiser, right?"

  Brooks remained silent and Oscar grabbed his whiskey, took another slug, and went on.

  "But Catalea must have changed her mind. But not until after the memories were already in her, and she saw what happened to that other girl. She backed out of your deal to try and protect herself. So, what did you do? You leaked her name to Greyson’s camp. Spread a rumor that she was going to testify.

  Brook shook his head. "That's a load of bullshit, Oscar. Why would I do any of that? How many whiskeys have you had?"

  "Not enough," Oscar grunted. "As for why you did it, that's easy. It was a gamble. You hoped Catalea would realize how much more danger she was in once Greyson got her in the scope. You were hoping she’d come running back to you once the waters got too hot. Worst case scenario, you could catch Greyson's people in the act of trying to kill her. Either way, you used her as bait. You had surveillance on her night and day, didn't you?"

  Brooks said nothing.

  "But I guess you forgot who you were dealing with," Oscar went on. "DeAndre Greyson may be an asshole, but he isn't stupid. He caught on to your ruse, your surveillance. And that's where the child came in. The infiltrator. The Trojan Horse. He played us pretty good, didn't he? Made us think Catalea was dead. Meanwhile he was torturing her in some underground lab for days… all because of you and your bullshit!"