by Mike Essex
It was as if the gravity was lower at this point in the tube, although I could still breathe so this must have been a unique concoction the TethTech lab rats had cooked up.
Eventually my body came to a stop and I could see into the laboratory with the dolphin. I could see the scientists working inside but they seemed oblivious to my presence. I was still upside down so I rotated round to stop the blood rushing to my head. It felt like swimming and being suspended in a large jelly.
As I turned myself around I pushed my arms down to help and this moved my entire body up the tube slightly. It seemed that through pushing my arms down I could travel up the tube. I experimented by pushing my arms upwards and this allowed me to move down the tube.
With my new found motion, I slowly pushed my arms upwards to work my way down the tube. I was scared that too much motion would cause me to drop out of this low gravity area and once again plummet to my death so I edged downwards with caution.
It didn’t take me long to reach the ground level, where I saw that the room had now been filled with TethTech guards. There didn’t seem to be any police.
Nevertheless, TethTech was a base for military R&D so they seemed to have plenty of their own guards available. More than enough to stop me and the seven bullets I had remaining.
They were clad in black jump suits, with circles that showed similar transparent body armour to that which Tobias was wearing. On their heads, they wore helmets that covered their faces. They were holding guns that I knew from police training could fire fifty rounds in seconds. If Tobias had issued an order for me to be killed, then it would take these men no time at all to do so.
Next to the window that showed the guards I could see a control panel on my side of the tube. Suddenly it made sense. This was a private means of travel for Tobias. He could spy on his tower and then get to any room quickly by jumping in the tube.
I looked upwards to see if he was following me but he was not. Perhaps the tube can only hold one person at a time? I thought. However if this was Tobias’ personal transport route, then one thing was certain. He knew I wasn’t dead.
--<><>--
Tobias Zen
Tobias looked down at the tube in shock. “You’re a brave one Emmie Keyes,” he said.
“Sir,” said the guard, who had now reached the top floor. He had blonde hair that flowed over his head in two directions and stopped around his shoulders.
“Well done Jacobs. You finally made it to the top, whilst she’s on her way to the bottom!” said Tobias.
“But how sir?” replied Jacobs.
“Look down there.”
Jacobs looked into the tube but couldn’t see Emmie. “Try it now,” said Tobias, as he showed the guard one of the holes in the side of the tube. At this angle the guard could see Emmie floating down the tower.
“I think I can take a shot Sir, would you like me to proceed?” asked Jacobs.
“No!” shouted Tobias. “The chamber contains a special gas that allows me to travel safely. If you shoot it, it will explode and damage the structural integrity of the whole building.”
The guard took off the visor and said. “Ok. The rest of the men are on the ground level. She won’t be able to get out. I’ll alert the authorities for their support as well.”
“Are you mad? The world’s media is assembled outside. If it looks like there is another attempt on my life, the stock price will nosedive. Getting kidnapped once was a great PR stunt. A second time would be career suicide. No, use the guards we have.”
“Yes sir. I’ll also position men at each of the floors so she can’t exit the tube at any point.”
“Your move Emmie. Escape at the bottom of the tower or at the top but I’ll catch you either way,” he smiled. “One more thing. Activate the Kull twins. I think it’s time they gave an encore.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Emmie Keyes
This was bad.
I couldn’t escape on the ground level and I refused to go anywhere near Tobias again. Then I remembered the basement area. Can I get down there? I wondered.
I looked down but all I saw were mirrors. Although I’d seen the basement from above, it couldn’t be accessed from the tube. The mirrors must help Tobias to see into the room but there had to be an entirely different way for him to get there.
My options were limited. I was trapped and to make matters worse I could see guards starting to walk towards my location. If Tobias had told them where I was, then there’s a good chance they’d know how to open the base of the tube and catch me.
Then I heard a loud banging on the side of the tube.
The banging grew louder and I watched as a panel on the tunnel wall above me began to loosen. With a final loud thud, the panel was released and yet it didn’t fall. It just hovered there thanks to the low gravity.
Unable to hide, I looked up to see the face of the man who would kill me.
“Grace?”
“Emmie?” asked Grace. “What happened to your disguise?”
“It’s a long story and we have more important things to worry about,” I motioned to the glass mirror and Grace saw the guards preparing to breach the door. They seemed more organised now and three of the men carried a battering ram.
“Get out of there now!” shouted Grace, as the men began to run towards the door with the battering ram raised in preparation.
I thrusted my arms downwards which sent me rising back up the tube and towards Grace. As I reached her level she grabbed me and pulled me inside. The return to normal gravity hit me instantly and I could feel the extra weight on my body dragging me down. I almost pulled Grace from her ladder when I swung round and grabbed the rungs below her.
The door on the lower level was breached in one hit and sent the panel flying. If I had still been down there the door would probably have killed me from the force.
Before the guards could enter the tube Grace pulled the panel next to us back into place. “Are you ok?” she asked me. I looked down to see a twenty foot drop and wasn’t sure how to answer.
“You’ll be ok, Emmie. Here,” said Grace, as she clipped my jeans onto her harness.
“Great, so if I fall at least my trousers will be safe.”
“Those are good jeans. It’d be a shame for them to go to waste.”
--<><>--
Tobias Zen
A guard entered the tube and lifted up the broken door. He looked around but could find no one. “Sir, they are not in the tube,” he stated into a headset.
“Impossible! I told you to guard every exit. Where have they gone?” boomed the voice of Tobias Zen.
“I don’t know but we will find them,” replied the guard.
Tobias turned his imposing figure towards Jacobs and asked him. “Is General Kull ready?”
“We’re hooking him up to his twin right now. He’ll be online in five minutes.”
Without saying another word Tobias jumped into the tube and descended down to the base of the tower. He was far more skilled than Emmie and had a smooth journey down to the bottom.
His orange sneakers touched the floor without making a sound, so elegant was his landing. He walked out onto the ground floor and tightened his orange tie. “The media are waiting for me, don’t screw this up.”
As the guards looked on confused, trying to determine how he had suddenly appeared, he walked out into the roars of the crowd. As important as Emmie was, he needed the media and his investors even more right now, especially if he was to make the world right again.
--<><>--
Emmie Keyes
We heard a whooshing noise as someone else descended the tube.
“It has to be Tobias,” I said to Grace.
“Emmie, what happened?” she asked.
“He killed Will.”
“No! He confessed?”
“Yes 100%. He killed Will to see if I would survive, like some crazy lab experiment. Now he wants to capture me.”
“We have to stop him,” said Grace. “
He can’t be allowed to stand out there with all that praise and all that glory after what he did.”
“I know but what can we do? There are so many guards. It’s impossible.”
“You’re right,” said Grace, being surprisingly level headed. “Right now, all we need to think about is escaping.”
“No Grace, there’s something else. Something we have to do now. I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t. I saw something in a basement level. A large room filled with animals in cages that were being experimented on.”
“That’s awful. You’re right. We have to save them.”
“It gets worse. In one of the cages I saw a man that was bound. His clothes were torn and he wore an army uniform.”
Grace gasped, “Gabe?”
TWENTY-FIVE
Gabe Treeth
Gabe Treeth had had a bad night. He’d been shot, kidnapped and had to live with the guilt of letting a mass murderer escape.
When it seemed like his day couldn’t get any worse, he’d awoken in a cage in a room filled with animals. The noise was deafening. Every animal had a voice and they wanted to use it. He counted twenty or so animals all trying to be heard and the sound simply did not stop.
When one animal stopped, another one would spark them off again. It was an assault on his senses and combined with the smell and the dim light he wondered if this was the way Tobias dished out torture.
Yet that wasn’t what worried Gabe. Mostly he was worried about The Deck. It was clear they’d be implicated in the failed attempt on Tobias’ life. They’d originally planned to clear all the media footage but there had been no time for that when everyone had made their escape.
The Deck was a young team that had only existed for a handful of years. Everyone in the team was in their early twenties, apart from the boss who funded them and kept them fed whilst they tried to track down Tobias.
It was the age of the team that worried him. None of them had seen proper combat and they’d spent so long planning the kidnapping attempt that there wasn’t much in the way of a contingency plan. The team looked to him for support and although he trusted them, he worried that they’d have to disband without him.
He knew the boss could help but he liked to stay private. Only Gabe knew who the boss really was and they wanted to keep it that way. Even if that meant The Deck would have to end, there’s no way the boss would ever set foot inside the derelict shopping centre they called their base.
Gabe hoped no one was planning to help him escape. He assumed he was being held in a base owned by Tobias and The Deck had already scanned through files and files of research that showed a direct assault on one of his towers would be suicide. Which made it all the more likely that was where he was being held.
He knew The Deck simply were not experienced enough to save him. He accepted his fate and knew that when silence fell in this room and the animals stopped their cries he would probably be killed.
Gabe wasn’t afraid of death but he was afraid of never seeing Grace again. Since the day he’d recruited her, he was taken aback by her headstrong attitude. No woman had ever spoken to him like Grace. She treated him like a school boy and told him what to do and he loved her for it. He’d never asked to be the leader but for most of The Deck that was how they saw him. Grace was different. She treated him as an equal, or possibly worse, and that made Gabe like her even more.
They vowed that when the economy was restored they would visit Europe and go travelling. When Tobias had been punished for his crimes, that’s when they’d explore the world.
They both knew it would never happen. The economy was too far gone and tensions were too high between nations to allow easy travel. Stopping Tobias hadn’t even been possible and Gabe started to wonder how they would achieve their dreams in such a broken world.
When Grace asked to leave midway through their mission he was angry but he knew that anything to do with Emmie came first. That’s what the boss wanted after all. As he sat in his cell thinking about Grace he knew that had been the right thing to do. It meant he knew Grace was safe no matter what.
Then he remembered just how head strong Grace was and that if anyone would be stupid enough to try and rescue him it would be her. “Stay safe Grace. Stay away.”
--<><>--
Emmie Keyes
I’d heard the name Gabe before. Who was I kidding, Grace barely shut up about the guy. He worked with her at the film studio as a director, whom she’d fallen in love with shooting a film called “Zombie Pets Attack!”
It was a great story, almost too good to be true really. The one how they fell in love, not the movie story which surely had to be awful.
Grace had never really liked guys. She saw them as the weaker sex and nothing more than “dumb testosterone fuelled meat sacks,” as she so often put it. I think it must have been all the time they spent together on the movie set but something changed her mind and the next time I saw her she would not stop talking about him.
Grace would never say anything as soppy as the word ‘love’ but if she loved anyone then it was Gabe.
“Gabe? What would they want with a movie director?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Grace. “Was he ok?”
“He looked hurt and his clothes were torn.”
A fire started to build in Grace’s eyes as she lightly bit her lip. There was no way we were leaving without him now. We both agreed that there was only one place to go now and we started to descend the ladder into the basement.
TWENTY-SIX
Emmie Keyes
The ladder took us down to below ground level and after we’d unhooked ourselves we took in our surroundings. We were enclosed in a wide grey maintenance tunnel and a bright ray of light shone towards us illuminating a pathway on my right hand side.
I crept forward towards it and could see that the light was emerging from a large room above the pathway with a curved sheet of hard glass separating us from the room. The glass was transparent and looking through it I could see guards circling around. It looked like the main lobby of the building and I dared not move forward too much in case of being spotted.
“Where now?” I asked Grace.
“Hang on. I’ll ask my contact,” she replied.
“Your contact?”
“We once filmed a movie at TethTech so I know someone who has schematics for the entire building. Hopefully they can find a way for us to get to the basement without being seen.”
Her contact continued to be very useful and I was reminded that when this was over I would have some serious questions for Grace. There’s no chance a movie studio would be given schematics for a building as secure as this. She picked up her phone and spoke quietly so as not to be detected.
--<><>--
Grace Wilkerson
“Jill?” asked Grace.
“Hi Grace. What’s up? How is Emmie?” replied Jill.
“She’s fine. We’re both in the tower.”
“You what? We specifically told you not to go in…”
“.. if I didn’t go in she’d be dead right now!” interrupted Grace. “Now listen, we know that Tobias killed Will. If we don’t make it out of here alive you have to stop him.”
“You know we can’t do that without Emmie. She has to survive, whatever happens.”
“What about me?”
“You know Emmie is the top priority. If she dies it’s all over.”
Grace paused for a moment. She didn’t like being told her life was worthless.
“Fine,” replied Grace, unhappy but trying to think about the bigger picture for a moment. “We need your help.”
--<><>--
Emmie Keyes
Within two minutes Grace had a full schematic of the building. Rather than proceeding through the well-lit walkway for fear of being caught we instead went through a dark passageway and used our phones to illuminate the way. We worked our way through twisted walkways and snuck under three floors until we reached a hole that led down into t
he basement.
We looked down and could see that the hole led to a ladder that would take us down. I climbed down it first and jumped off the last few rungs.
As I landed my feet made a loud ‘thudding’ noise and the room erupted to the sound of the animals. Dogs barked fiercely, a monkey screeched and it was clear they saw us as intruders.
The room was still quite dark, mainly lit by floodlights that swung in the air above each cage. It was just enough light to make out the faces of each animal and to see their distress. The conditions in the room were terrible. The floor was covered in dirt and the cages themselves were enclosed in rusted metal bars. It was a stark contrast to the pristine nature of the rest of the building and it was clear the contents of this room were far less important than the rest of the building.
In one of the cages a small dog lay on the floor. She wasn’t sleeping but she seemed to have no energy as if she had given up. Her fur had started to fall away around her neck and back and in the centre of these areas were round red dots that looked like they were from injections.
“Poor girl,” said Grace. “Perhaps they were trying to save her?”
“Look around. Does this seem like a room full of happy animals?” I said. “If you want help you go to a vet, you don’t bring an animal to a place like this.”
I looked at the dog’s eyes. Two big adorable eyes that just wanted to be loved. All of the animals were trapped into cages, around twenty of them.
“It’s really you!” exclaimed Grace, as she ran over to a corner cage.
A man lay on the floor. At the back of his head his hair has been shaved and he too had round red circular dots where he had been injected with a mixture of needles.
He heard Grace’s voice instantly and turned around. “Grace!” he said, as a smile filled his face.
Not wanting to wait another second longer they kissed through the bars. Their arms tried to reach each other but they could not.