by Mike Essex
“You needed an enemy,” I replied, putting the pieces together.
“Now you’re getting it. Every time they attacked me and I escaped unscathed the share price of TethTech shot up. Do you know how much media coverage we got when they tried something? Even I couldn’t buy that kind of publicity!”
Just like Eli, it seemed Tobias had been playing a game all along. The two of them had been trying to outsmart each other for over twenty years and even now they both thought they were smarter than each other.
“But in the end he won,” I replied.
“Did he?” said Tobias, mocking confusion. “Until one of us is dead the game isn’t over. Don’t forget that I have the upper hand. He thinks I’m gone and he won’t know what hit him.”
“That’s only if you kill him first,” I replied as I watched Grace wipe the tears from her eyes. Eli had no shortage of enemies in this room.
Grace put Kenan’s dog tag over her neck and gently touched it to her lips. Then without saying a word she dove down into the cavern filled with bodies.
“Jesus Christ!” said Tom, as he watched her land. “I’ve got some of the dog tags, you don’t have to go down there.”
Grace ignored him and started searching low to the floor moving the bodies to one side and unhooking dog tags where she could find them. She tossed them up to Tom as I shone the torch down, illuminating the void.
Tom started to lay the dog tags out next to each other, gathering them together into the different suits. He found Diamonds, Clubs and Spades but there were no Hearts to be found.
“That’s weird,” said Tom, “there aren’t any Hearts. Is that all of them?”
Grace shifted the bodies around but couldn’t find any more dog tags.
“What suit were March and Gabe?” I asked.
“Hearts,” said Tom. “Figures.”
Grace jumped out of the hole, her hands covered in the blood of her friends. I removed a bottle of water from my back and offered it to her so she could wash off the blood.
“No,” she moved the bottle away. “I want to remember what we’ve lost.”
She wiped her hands together in an effort to help the blood dry. The blood mixed in with the burn on her hand and it looked worse than ever.
“Is there anywhere else we should look?” I asked Tobias.
“Nowhere your friends wouldn’t have looked already,” he replied.
“This can’t be all there is?” I replied. Finding the bodies had only made things worse.
“I’m sorry,” I told Grace. “We never should have come here.”
“It’s ok. You of all people know how important it is to have closure,” she said, probably alluding to my search for Will. “At least now I know what has to be done.”
She started walking towards the exit only for Tom to shout out “Wait. Emmie what card are you?”
I wondered if he was testing me, so I humoured him. “The King of Clubs.”
“I knew it!” he replied. “Where is your dog tag right now?”
“Back on my body I think. I was wearing it when they captured me. Why?”
“Then this shouldn’t exist,” he held up a dog tag with the King of Clubs.
“Maybe someone just tossed it in there after I was captured?” I replied.
“Maybe,” said Tom, his mind for conspiracy theories running wild. “But why would someone come all this way just to drop your dog tag down here? That seems like a lot of work for no reason.”
Grace snatched the dog tag from his hand and looked at it intently. “You’re right Tom, something doesn’t add up,” she flipped the dog tag around in her hand and then startled asked me, “Was this always here?”
I shone my torch on the dog tag and illuminated a chipped bit in the middle of it. “No that wasn’t there,” I replied. “Perhaps it got damaged in the pit?”
“Or perhaps that chip is the most important thing of all,” said Tom. He snatched the dog tag back from Grace and positioned it on the edge of a table. Picking up a piece of debris from the floor he bought it down hard on the middle part of the dog tag.
With a sharp ‘thunk’ sound the dog tag split in two and one half fell to the floor. Tom picked up both halves and examined the middle of them.
“What do we have here?” he asked.
I shone the light on the middle part of the dog tag and could see it had a black inside, somewhat unusual given the grey metal design on the outside. Tom showed me the other half and there was no such inside, it was solid metal.
As the light of the torch rebounded off the metal inside of the dog tag I saw a flash of light illuminate the room. Tom and Grace seemed oblivious to it but for me it burned brightly until it was all I could see.
No matter how many times I blinked all I could see was the light, not even the closing of my eyes could block it out.
I could hear a voice ask me something faintly.
I tried to focus on the voice as the man repeated what he had said. “Are you ready?”
The bright light started to fade until I could start to make out my surroundings. I was sat at a curved wooden table, surrounded by twelve seats that were empty apart from the one next to me.
I looked at the man who had bought me back to reality and saw that he was the same army officer that had greeted me the last time I’d switched bodies.
With no control over my own voice I replied “Yes Damon. I’m ready.”
“Good,” he replied. “A nuclear attack is the last play we have left now.”
FOURTEEN
‘A nuclear attack?’ That thought ran through my mind as I tried to understand what was happening. I couldn’t speak or move, I was trapped in this vessel.
I heard the sound of a door opening and my vision shifted to the right and up as my new body stood tall. I tried to catch a reflection of his face but couldn’t see it clearly through the blacked out windows.
Three women and seven men entered the room. They were smartly dressed, some of them in army attire, the others in expensive looking suits. Although they said hello to each other, there was a look of frustration in their faces. They looked stressed, like people carrying a heavy burden and it was clear none of them were getting enough sleep.
One man carried a briefcase that was handcuffed to his wrist. On the side of it were two separate sets of locks. He laid it down very gently onto the table.
“Just waiting on one more?” asked my vessel in a formal voice.
The room sat in silence whilst everyone waited for the final attendee. As one of the men shuffled the papers in front of him his hand started to shake. He muttered a few words to himself and closed his eyes whilst breathing slowly. After a minute of relaxed breathing he managed to calm himself down. During that time no-one else tried to help him.
The door opened and everyone stared towards it again. Eli entered the room and without any control I felt my arm rise up towards my head as I saluted him.
I felt sick seeing him again and disgusted by the fact I had to salute him and show him any kind of respect. He didn’t deserve this admiration from me or from anyone else in the room. If only they knew the truth.
Eli ordered us to sit and everyone sat down in unison. I wondered if this was just a room of his puppets. If maybe I was controlling all of the participants. It was possible they were all wearing contact lenses to block out the orange eyes but that didn’t seem like his style. He preferred to manipulate a select few; perhaps he just liked the challenge.
“I am sorry to bring you all here today on such short notice,” said Eli.
He stared right at me and gave me a knowing look. For a second I thought that everything would end there and then. Did he know I’d broken free? Was this his way of showing me he’d taken control of me again? Or was he just aware he controlled this body?
I tried to pull away from the body but couldn’t find my way back to the snatcher. I was trapped here as long as Eli wanted me to be.
“But as you are aware, the situation is a
grave one and action must be taken,” said Eli. “Has a vote been taken?”
“Yes sir,” the words escaped my mouth but I didn’t want to speak them.
I hated seeing him so close to me. All I wanted to do was reach out and kill him there and then. I was very aware of the gun pressed against my ankle. I just needed one chance to make up for the shot that should have killed him before. Was that too much to ask?
The nervous man handed over his stack of papers to Eli. He flicked through them rather dramatically and then slowly placed them back down on the table with care.
In my mind I shouted out commands for the soldier, hoping that one of them would stick. I focused intently on the gun and Eli’s throat, trying to tie the two thoughts together into something cohesive. The thoughts didn’t take root.
“I know that this action is not a popular one and that if we had any other solution then we would take it,” said Eli. “But the safety of this country and its people comes first. That is what we swore to protect and your votes have allowed us to do that.”
The briefcase was pushed towards Eli and two of the men stood either side of him. They each retrieved a key and opened the lock on their sides. The case was opened towards Eli and away from me. I desperately wanted to rise up and peek inside.
“The results of this operation will be kept classified at the highest level. I trust that I have your full support in this matter?” said Eli.
“Yes, sir,” we replied in unison.
“Thank you all for your time today”, Eli replied as he closed the briefcase.
I blinked and as I opened my eyes again I was back in the snatcher’s body. Eli and the briefcase he had taken were nowhere to be seen.
Grace stood over me, a gun aimed at my face.
“It’s still me, I swear,” I explained.
“It had better be,” said Grace. “What happened to you?”
“I jumped into one of the bodies Eli is controlling. I think he is planning a nuclear attack.”
“Where? When?” asked Grace.
“I don’t know. All I know is a bunch of Government puppets voted for him to take action, but I don’t know on what.”
“Could he be trying to stop an attack?”
“It’s possible. I didn’t hear enough to be sure.”
Tom came over and commented; “We can ask your father when we find him. It looks like we have someone on our side after all.”
He held up a small black square no larger than a nail in size.
“This was inside the dog tag. It’s a data drive,” he explained. “Someone wanted us to find this. We should get it back to the base for analysis.”
“There’s no time for that,” said Grace. “If he really is planning a nuclear attack then we need to find him now.”
Grace pulled out her phone and grabbed the drive from Tom. She pressed down on the side of her phone and placed the drive into a small groove than opened up.
“This will transmit the data to our secure cloud server,” she explained. “Not even Jacobi will be able to see it until we grant him access, but we can start running a decryption program on it now to find the answers quicker.”
She showed me a bar on her phone that highlighted the upload time. It was at 0% and trying to connect to the server.
“Don’t worry, it’ll connect once we get out of this base,” said Grace.
“Ok, so where do we go in the meantime?” Tom asked.
“Let’s go back to the town we passed through earlier,” said Grace. “I don’t want to stay here any longer.”
I gathered up the dog tags we’d found and put them in my backpack. If they contained any other secrets then I wanted to make sure we had them to hand. It also felt like some small way to honour the fallen.
“When all this is over we’ll come back and bury the bodies,” said Grace.
We all agreed.
As we reached the entrance I took one last look back at what had once been the Deck’s base. Now it was nothing more than a graveyard with no more secrets to tell. I took solace in the fact that one day this whole area would be demolished and a new city built in its place.
As the security doors started to close I saw a blinding light surge behind them. I wasn’t ready to go back to the soldier’s body, not when I had so much to do here.
“Down,” shouted Grace and she pulled me and Tom to the floor, as the doors slammed shut. This was no Tether event.
The sound of the explosion ricocheted through my ears, causing them to ring intensely. My vision was blurred and I could barely make out the silhouettes of the security doors laying twisted on the floor.
“We … et … ere” I looked at Grace and tried to hear what she was saying but couldn’t make it out. She pulled me to my feet as the second explosion was triggered. Shrapnel flew out of the base, rebounding all around us, narrowly missing my back.
I found my footing and started to climb up the stairs. I made an ‘OK’ sign with my hands and Grace went back for Tom. I looked behind to see that he was laid prone on the floor barely moving.
“Keep going,” said Tobias in my mind. “You can’t stop your father if you’re dead.”
Every instinct told me to carry on but I couldn’t leave Tom behind. All I could think about was how Chris had sacrificed himself to save us and how much Tom had idolised him. I couldn’t let Tom be doomed to face the same fate as his mentor.
I turned around and went back down the stairs, whilst Tobias screamed in my mind for me to get out. It made me thankful my hearing was starting to come back so I could at least hear something else.
Grace had her hands under one side of Tom and I did the same on the other. On the count of three we lifted his body up, the snatcher’s extra muscle mass finally coming in handy for something. When his feet were flat on the floor Tom straightened his legs out and tried to stand. He took a sharp sudden intake of breath from the pain.
I looked down at his legs and looked away horrified by what I’d seen. A piece of shrapnel had forced itself through Tom’s leg. He might never walk again, let alone out of the building.
“Leave … me,” said Tom, his face a pale grey colour.
“You can do it Tom,” I replied.
With the elevator out of power our only option was to help Tom up the staircase and up to the higher level of the shopping centre. With no time to treat the injury we left the shrapnel in place, hoping it would reduce the flow of blood, until we could get him to safety.
Grace and I coordinated our movements to help Tom up one step at a time as he steadied himself on his good leg between each one. It was agonising work, made no easier by the continued demands to get out by both Tobias in my mind and Corinna through my earpiece.
I ignored them both and focused on the encouragement of Grace and the desire to get Tom out of here. Above us I could hear the sounds of the shopping centre creaking, its very core rocked by the earlier explosion. I had no idea if there would even be a way out now.
“Why now?” asked Tom as we neared the top of the stairway.
“It’s not your time,” I told him.
“No, why … explode now?” he struggled to say.
Tom was right, they’d been back to the Deck’s base many times and never triggered an explosion.
“We found the bodies?” I suggested.
“Why not when we found them?” asked Tom.
“No,” said Grace. “Hold Tom for a second,” she asked me.
I took Tom’s weight and lent his body against the wall.
Frantically Grace reached into her pocket and retrieved her phone.
“99% upload,” she said as she tapped it repeatedly. “100 per…”
Her words were cut off by a fresh explosion, this time surging through the shopping centre itself. A surge of flames burst through the door above us and I instinctively ducked down, almost dropping Tom in the process.
His face slid towards mine and I saw how pale he had become. “Go… now,” he mumbled, barely able to support
his own body. “Walk…way.”
“Walkway?” I replied as we took a few more steps upwards together with Tom.
Then I remembered. We’d had to jump over a broken bit of walkway on the way here. How could we possibly get Tom across?
We reached the next floor up, where we’d originally entered the stairwell. I looked up toward the rest of the stairwell only to find that the stairs had collapsed long ago. We weren’t getting out that way.
Grace took the lead as we walked towards the open doorway on our level. Together we caught our first glimpse of the shops since the explosion. The greenery that had made the centre its own was now ablaze, cutting off many of the routes out and flooding the shops and walkways with smoke. Were it not for the open top ceiling we’d be completely surrounded by the fumes.
Above us the roof groaned violently as the metal started to twist in ways it had never been meant to. It had already been weak from one of the main walls being demolished long before we arrived. If another wall had taken the brunt of the explosion then we’d need to move quickly with or without Tom.
We made our way along the walkway towards the gap that we’d previously jumped across. The smoke clouded my vision and much of our journey was done on memory alone, taking careful steps forward one foot at a time, edging our way around any new gaps that had formed.
Tom coughed from the smoke, his body shifting as he did so. The snatcher was strong but carrying Tom this long was starting to take its toll. I felt weak and I knew that for all her bravado Grace no doubt felt the same. Our pace slowed down at a time when we needed to ramp it up.
Tom’s head was hanging down on his chest, walking proving too demanding for him to continue on. Without Tom propelling us forward we lost momentum and I felt his body slip off my shoulder and down to the floor. I reached to grab his back but my arm bucked again and he landed hard on the floor. The walkway shook from the impact and all around me I could hear the sound of cracking.
“Get him up quick!” said Grace but it was too late. The walkway buckled from the pressure and the section in front of us broke free of its shackles. We tipped forward as the front part of the walkway plunged towards the ground and watched as Tom’s body slid away from us and into the dark smoke below.