Codename: Nightshade (Deadly Seven Strike Force)

by Anderson, S

  Seems like the blood would stain through eventually. Maybe that’s why they keep everything so white—they can just bleach their sins away.

  I’m losing control of what little sanity I’ve retained in this illusion when we reach a closed door.

  “Security panel,” he whispers. “Damn.”

  “Four ones,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The code. It’s 1-1-1-1.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I stare at the floor, realizing offhandedly that I’m barefoot. I always have shoes in the dreams with Nikolai.

  “Shade,” he says, shaking me to catch my attention. “How do you know that’s the right code?”

  “The tone. They punch the same keys to open every door, and the tone is for one. It beeps four times.”

  “You have numeric tones memorized?”

  I shrug a shoulder. “I’m a freak.”

  “Bloody hell,” he mumbles, punching in the code. “You’re worse than Pretty Boy when he gets wasted.”

  A random memory is sparked by that. I see Ace looking down at me with heavily hooded eyes and feel his hands cup my ass as we sway to some God awful 90s grunge music. The scent of stale beer fills my nose.

  “Don’t get all handsy or this dance is done right now,” I'd told him.

  He hummed, moving his hands up my back to pull me in closer. “You know what I’m going to call you?” I remember I shook my head. “Pineapple.”

  The face I made amused him. “My name is Penelope.”

  “Nope. Pineapple. You’re hard and prickly on the outside, but I bet you’re sweet as fuck on the inside… juicy.”

  I gave him a black eye that night. And he’s called me Pineapple ever since.

  Drunk Ace is a pain in the ass.

  The door unlocks, and he thanks me for my freaky brain. He holds it open as I shuffle through.

  I take one step inside and double over as a disgusting odor hits me. I heave, holding my hand over my mouth.

  He runs into my back as he tries to follow. “What are you…? Bloody hell, that’s a powerful stink.”

  I take several deep breaths, wishing my sense of smell would just disappear. I look around once the urge to puke fades. We stand in a huge empty room. Metal columns are spread every few feet, supporting bare metal framework above. It’s like the place was only half-built with the bones but no real structure inside. Somewhere, something is dripping. The ground squishes under my bare feet.

  I feel like I’m being slowly digested by this part of the building.

  This can’t be real. First Claymore and Hassan are working together, and now I walk through a doorway from a typical medical facility to… an abandoned warehouse.

  “I thought this was the exit,” he says as he explores further ahead. “The map shows this as the exit.”

  I’m still taking in the smell. I recognize it. Death isn’t something you forget once you’ve tasted it with all five senses.

  Claymore wanders through a doorway on the other end of the space. I work my way to the side. Sunlight fights through cracks in the walls. I’m thankful not more can get in. I don’t think I want to see what exactly is under my feet.

  One patch of ground is lit up. I hesitate before stepping closer. To my relief, the ground is just mud and a few weeds, at least in that highlighted spot. I stall a few steps away when I see the reddish orange flowers.

  Poppies.

  I wonder where we are, whether they’re indigenous to the area. I kneel down, inspecting them. They’re growing from the mud. How?

  “Damn,” Claymore says. “This must be a façade of some sort. There’s a door up there, but it’s rigged shut. We gotta work our way back.”

  I’m still caught up in staring at the flowers when I hear the familiar whoosh of his knife twirling in the air. My stomach sinks as a thought fills my head—not a gun with him. I'll have to kill him with his knife.

  “Come on,” he says, not bothering with helping me up. He knows I can walk on my own.

  He never babies me.

  I’m noticing a pattern with the men in my life.

  I grab one of the flowers, clutching it tightly as I hop up and follow him. We walk back down the side hall and take another hall to the right. I have no idea where we are. My focus is entirely on the flash of metal I see over his shoulder each time he tosses the knife into the air.

  Unlike every time a false Nikolai has been shoved at me, I’m reluctant to kill Claymore. I don’t know why. I love Nikolai in a way I can never love anyone else. I don’t love MacNeal like that. I do love him. He really is my best friend. Maybe that’s my answer. Maybe I’m okay with false friends so long as I’m not alone, but I can’t have a lie about Nikolai live in this world.

  Goddamn, the crazier I am, the more poetic I get.

  “Maybe we should try one of these doors?” he suggests.

  Why is he asking me? I’ve never once tried to escape this place. Never paid attention to anything but the walk to and from my cell.

  He enters the code at the first door we come to and ushers me inside.

  It’s a bust. We’re standing in a room with rows of computers. A few servers are situated in the back. I stare at all the blinking lights from the towers. I can’t help but wonder what sort of information is transmitted from this place.

  “Oh, bloody fucking hell,” he says. “I should have studied that map harder.”

  “Not really,” I say, ambling over to a computer. “You should have just followed the path you took to get in.”

  “Aye, I followed Hassan. I dunno how he didn’t get lost.”

  I sit in one of the blue plastic chairs. “He’s a rat. He’s used to getting out of mazes.”

  “You know, from all the shit you’ve talked about the guy over the years, I have to admit he’s surprised me.”

  “He’s a good liar.”

  “Aye… but you might be surprised to find he has reasons for it.”

  Anger rattles me from deep inside. I see the reflection of the knife in the monitor in front of me.

  Maybe killing him won’t be so hard, after all.

  I touch my fingers to the keyboard in front of me. I can’t remember the last time I used a computer.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  He pulls out the chair next to mine and sits. “This isn’t you, Shade. Why haven’t you tried to break out? Why aren’t you participating in figuring out our next move? Look at me.” He shoves my shoulder until I turn in his direction. “Don’t you want answers about how I found you? Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

  Honestly, I don’t. I’m tired of the traps springing on my hands.

  “Do you have any idea what we’re dealing with here?”

  I stare directly into his eyes, letting all the horror I’ve witnessed fill mine own. “Do you?”

  He stares back, determined to not let me get to him. “DMG.”

  I’m really starting to hate those three letters.

  “This is a facility ran by them, testing chemical warfare of some kind. It’s sanctioned under military funding.”

  Why doesn’t that surprise me? “Is that why they’ve tested us from the start?”

  His face scrunches with confusion. “Why who has done what?” He shakes his head, giving up on my answer without asking me a question. “Russian military, Shade. That’s what Roman was running from. They wanted him to get on board with the next wave of this shit, and he ran.”

  I’m impressed. My brain—or rather, Heinrich’s program—is coming up with info that sounds authentic enough to explain everything.

  “So what? Are you saying DMG is a Russian outfit?”

  “Not directly. It’s a terrorist organization with plants in different countries, you know that already. But this?” He waves his hand around the room. “This is protected by the Russian military. And I’d wager not with the known consent of the Russian government.”
/>   I can’t help it. My mind likes a good riddle. I play along for the moment. “How can the military fund a program that the government is unaware of?”

  “Well, that’s something I couldn’t come up with either until I talked to Hassan.”

  Hassan. Of course. The poison that infects the healthiest of bodies.

  “What did dear old dude-who-knocked-up-my-mother have to say about that?”

  He gets this look in his eyes that I’m used to seeing now. Heinrich has it. The minions have it. And now he has it, too.

  She’s too far-gone to help.

  He twirls his knife one last time, tucking the blade between the handles before he sets it on the table in front of him. He boots up the computer. “Do you think we can access the internet with these things?”

  I think we can access satellites and WMDs with these things, but I don’t tell him that. I just nod. I have no doubt that these are monitored on a system that will alert the hub that someone is accessing information from this location. No security alarms have triggered, but I don’t expect any to. First of all, this is a dream, not reality. And secondly, I’m pretty sure this is the kind of place that just quietly closes all the doors and traps you inside.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask, eyeing the knife. It’s only a few inches away from my hand. This doesn’t have to keep going. I can end it right now.

  I just have to kill my best friend.

  No biggie.

  Just one more sin on my soul.

  You’ll learn to love sin, Poppy.

  My hand tightens over the flower in my fist. I don’t know what it means. Poppies are symbols of death. They grow on the graves of fallen soldiers. Maybe my mind is trying to be too literal for its own good.

  We’re all gonna die.

  We’re all going to die someday, Shade.

  He taps on the keys like he’s got a vendetta with them. It makes me cringe. The keys are our tools, not our enemies. It’s the one pushing them that needs to do all the work.

  “I’m hoping I can bring up the map of this place,” he says.

  It’s a futile search. Hassan probably had access to blueprints because years ago he sold some information to some Russian dude who had the layout of this building as collateral. It’s not something they store on their Apple drive for someone to hack into.

  “Search abandoned Russian warehouses,” I say, more as a joke than anything.

  “Aye?”

  The trust in his eyes disarms me. Usually with fake Nikolai, I can pinpoint something that warns me a computer generated him. A look… a word… once I even realized he was walking with a limp. But I can’t find a single thing about Claymore that’s fake. This world around us, the circumstances of his partnership with Hassan, even the idea that the Russian military is behind this facility all feel too improbable for reality.

  But not him.

  If I didn't know any better, I’d swear he was the real deal.

  Beware the Daeva.

  “Yeah, the more specific to the area you can be, the more likely you are to find specs on the building.”

  His fingers fly over the keys now, the search immersing him to the point of ignoring me. My hand scoots slowly toward the knife.

  “By the way,” he says, glancing at me. I freeze, my hand flattening on the table less than an inch away from its target. “Do you know where we are?”

  I shake my head. I don’t care to know. I’m in Hell. That’s all I need to know.

  “We’re in the mountains… snow so damn deep it choked the snowmobile Hassan brought.”

  I don’t know what mountains he’s talking about. I don’t care. The edge of my pinky touches the cool polished edge of the knife’s handle.

  “Siberia.”

  Siberia. This illusion is pulling out all the stops.

  I’ve never been to Siberia.

  Nikolai was going to take me there one day.

  He starts typing again, and I tell myself to just bite the bullet.

  “Shade, you do know that I see you reaching for that, aye?”

  We have a moment. Just a moment. Our eyes meet, and his say he thinks it’s funny that I’m going to try to touch the knife. Mine say that I’m sorry I’m about to do what I have to do.

  That’s all the warning he gets.

  I grab the knife, slinging the blade out as we both jump to our feet. I have the advantage of not only his surprise, but his lack of wanting to hurt me in my favor. He goes on the defense and not the offense, holding his hands up in surrender.

  “Shade, what are you doing?”

  “I wish you were real.”

  “I am.”

  “No,” I say, before my mind can tell me more lies. “It’s never real. I don’t know where it stopped being real, but this…” I shake my head. "Not real."

  “Shade,” he pleads, trying to ease me down. This really is Heinrich’s best attempt yet. “I don’t know what’s been happening here, but I’m real. This is real. I’m going to get you out.”

  “I know,” I say, jumping off my last cliff of sanity. “But I can’t let you.”

  I lunge forward, losing my nerve a second before I plunge it into his stomach and go for his thigh instead. I miss any major arteries. He could still die, but it’ll be a long, slow death.

  He falls to the ground with a grunt, clutching his leg. Blood gushes from the wound, soaking his white suit and coating the white tile floor.

  I’m mesmerized by it as I wait for Heinrich to show up.

  “What the bloody hell is wrong with you?”

  Claymore leaves the knife in, scooting as close to the table as he can.

  I’m a neutralized threat. I put distance between us, pressing my back to the wall by the door.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “You deserved more mercy than that, but I couldn’t…”

  “Wake the fuck up, Shade.”

  “I am awake, Coogan.”

  He makes a disgruntled noise at the sound of his real name. It strikes me as odd that he doesn’t fight me. Even now, injured, he doesn’t try to take me out.

  “I’ve never been more awake in my life.”

  “You’re sleepwalking, lass.” He crawls up into the chair. His breathing is labored. Sweat is beading on his forehead and cheeks. He leans heavily on the table as he fishes for something in his pocket. “I didn’t want to show you this. Hassan and I found it when we locating you earlier. I downloaded it for evidence.”

  I stand serenely watching him with only half interest. The more blood he loses, the closer I get to this ending.

  He plugs a USB into the port of the CPU and opens a file. A giant screen that covers the far wall lights up with a white title card with yellow letters that read Subject A Test 001.

  Subject A. Nikolai.

  I feel my right cheek twitch. “What is this?”

  “Footage,” Claymore says breathlessly.

  I start to ask more questions, but he shakes his head.

  “Just watch it, Shade.”

  The screen fades to a room—the observation room. It looks exactly like it does every time I’m in it. A single chair sits in the center. A door flies open, and two guards drag a large body in.

  He doesn’t have to move for me to know who it is. Nikolai.

  “Put him in the chair and strap the binds to his wrists,” Heinrich says as he follows them in. If not for the same nasally high-pitched voice, I wouldn’t recognize the evil bastard. He looks young, so much younger than he is now.

  My cheek twitches.

  “This is from…” Ten years ago. I can’t finish the thought out loud. When we were drinking shots in Nikolai’s office, toasting the life he lost, he was here chained to that chair.

  The guards strap Nikolai in. He’s unconscious, his weight leaning heavily into the binds.

  “Time to wake up, General Zolkov,” Heinrich says, snapping something open under Nikolai’s nose.

  Nikolai’s body jerks as he wakes. He blinks several times, flinching when h
e sees Heinrich. “No,” he shouts, struggling against his restraints.

  “Yes, General. Welcome to your new home.”

  “What do you want?” Nikolai asks. The feed is fuzzy and the angle shitty, but I’m pretty sure he has bruises on his face from previous torture.

  “I told you it is very simple, General Zolkov,” Heinrich says. “Give us a suggestion of which team member to recruit, and we will let you go free.”

  “Go to Hell.”

  The soldier standing behind him jabs the butt of his rifle into the base of Nikolai’s spine. He grunts, holding in the bulk of his pain, but it’s not hard to tell it had to hurt.

  “This can be an easy exchange, General,” Heinrich says. “You have been through this process before. Many times.”

  You’ve been here before, Miss Vincent. The tick in my cheek intensifies.

  Nikolai blinks with a stunned look on his face. “I’ve never… I would never…”

  “You have and you would,” Heinrich assures him. “You just don’t remember.”

  You just don’t remember. I feel ill, acid rising in the back of my throat. Which one of us was he lying to? Or is he telling us both the truth?

  Nikolai’s hands wrap around the taut chains. I can tell by the look on his face that he’s trying to make himself remember whatever he forgot.

  It’s not there, Nick. It’s not there.

  His cheek twitches hard enough I can see it on the feed. Mine twitches, too.

  “His cheek.” I point to the screen where the red line runs down the left side of his face. “That wound.”

  “Aye, the scar that didn’t heal.”

  Just like his tattoo.

  “What did I tell you?” Nikolai asks.

  “That is not of any concern right now, General,” Heinrich says, waving him off. “What I am concerned with now is your newly formed team of super spies.”

  My hands unconsciously tighten into fists. Something’s not right. This isn’t the usual feeling I get when I realize Nikolai isn’t real. This is that feeling you get when you’re trapped in between sleep and alertness.

  Nikolai looks fierce as he snarls. “I won’t tell you a damn thing about them.”

  Heinrich sighs as if he’s bored. He waves for another soldier to hand him something. As he steps closer to Nikolai, I see it’s a syringe. “Do you know what this is, General?”