by P A Vasey
I pulled back and gave her a smile. “Look after yourself,” I said.
John looked over her shoulder and squinted at me, reaching out a hand for a shake. “I don’t think we’ve met. Which section do you work in?”
His eyebrows furrowed as he looked for my lanyard.
I shook my head and didn’t reciprocate the shake. “I’m sorry for what I have to do.”
I reached into his brain and scrambled the signals tracking though his hippocampus, the neocortex and the amygdala. Areas that controlled memory. He slumped over onto the woman, making loud snoring noises.
She grabbed him. “John!”
“He’ll be okay,” I said. “And so will you.”
And with that I did the same to her and as she lapsed into unconsciousness I placed her gently into a prone position on the bench, her head on his knees. They looked like they were both now taking a mid-afternoon nap.
Taking the lanyard from around her neck, I stood up. A schematic of the Pentagon popped into my head. As its name suggested the building had five sides with specific, named entrances; the River Entrance essentially fronted the section of the building dedicated to the Air Force. Five floors above ground, two basement levels and five ring corridors per floor. The rings were designated from the center out ‘A’ through ‘E’, with ten main corridors bisecting the rings like spokes in a bicycle wheel. Each corridor was connected to upper levels by ramps instead of elevators, and there were half-corridors located between the numbered corridors. To my amazement the total space was six and a half million square feet, making it the world’s largest office building.
Time to go.
THIRTY-ONE
I walked briskly across the grassy rectangle to the concrete driveway and past a couple of black government issue Lincoln Town Cars and a Lincoln Navigator. One of the Town Cars had its window partially wound down, the driver inside reading a newspaper, light cold rain drizzling on the windscreen. Discreet security cameras poked out every ten yards or so along the roof, but there was no overt military presence outside. An extremely overweight police officer shuffled slowly down the steps, not looking at me, pulling his collar up to keep the chill out. I put my head down and mirrored his actions, pretending to feel the cold.
The main entrance consisted of four large wooden doors inlaid in concrete behind a row of imposing square pillars that seemed to physically prop up the levels above. I pushed through and entered E-Ring. There was a partial mezzanine area over on the right with what was almost certainly a cafeteria, from the cacophony of chatter floating down. Turning left I joined a throng of people seemingly coming and going at random. A metal detector and body scanner controlling access to Corridor 8 was manned by two soldiers and three security officers. There was a degree of anxiety and enhanced attentiveness coming from them, which was not surprising given the number of attacks reported around the country. The soldiers and security guards had no idea they were under attack by homicidal aliens, due to the misinformation coming out of the White House. They continued to do their job, checking ID and putting workers through the scanners in the usual way, imagining they were all … well, human.
Four people were waiting in line to go through: just office workers returning to their jobs after a morning coffee break. Despite the civility from the gatekeepers the atmosphere was guarded and the pat downs and checks definitely looked more thorough than usual.
I joined the queue and started to get nervous. The metal detector was going to be the first problem. While I didn’t know what exactly my machine body was constructed of, at least some of it was metallic and would set off an alarm, leading to a further, more invasive search. Secondly, the lanyard around my neck read MARCIA FOORD, SECTION 76 and the photograph looked nothing like me.
The omens weren’t good.
I was soon facing a marine, sandy hair shaved closely, beret, finely chiseled cheekbones and piercing green eyes. His M16 was carried loosely in his arms. His name badge read ARMSTRONG.
He looked at me and said nothing, registering presumably that the person in front of him wasn’t carrying a bag or purse or phone, which in itself may have been a red flag. I was also keenly aware that this machine body, though it had my face, was at least a foot taller than my previous human form. I had been five foot eight and a dirty blonde thirty-something, and now I was an Amazonian brunette of indeterminate age. I consoled myself with the fact that they weren’t looking for me and also probably wouldn’t recognize me from the pictures the White House had broadcast.
I glanced surreptitiously up at the walls, where there was a bank of security cameras with slowly blinking red lights. Reaching out with my mind I performed the same trick as before, triggering a continuous loop of video footage. However, in a busy corridor such as this one, my subterfuge wouldn’t survive any detailed scrutiny. So far I’d been lucky as no one had come in to queue behind me. Yet.
The marine snapped his fingers, bringing me to attention. “ID please.”
He wanted a closer look at the lanyard around my neck. The other soldier a couple of feet behind was also checking me out. Two security officers on the other side of the metal detector were watching, waiting for me to go through. A third was sitting at a computer screen linked to the detector and the Pentagon communication network. He seemed distracted by something on his phone, which I figured might work in my favor here.
I handed the lanyard over and at the same time infiltrated his mind. He shook his head as my consciousness wrapped around his and I selectively closed down certain areas of his brain.
Hand me the lanyard back now, and say ‘Go right ahead’.
His eyes glazed over and he blinked lazily before looking up. For a second I thought he was going to raise his weapon and challenge me. However, he had gotten the message. “Go right ahead,” he said clumsily, as if drunk.
He waved me through and the other soldier pointed to the metal detector. I nodded and slowly walked toward it while concentrating on the computer terminal. I poured my mind into its circuits and found the pathway connecting the detector feed from the array around the frame to the terminal. I temporarily froze it and strode through in a confident fashion. There were no noises or alarms. The guy playing with his phone briefly glanced up at the monitor, but as it remained blank and boring he resumed checking his messages or Instagram feed or whatever.
I approached the archway into the corridor, neither fast nor slow, walking at a steady pace so as not to attract undue attention. The walls were decorated with flags of the National Guard and photographs of famous or notable Air Force commanders. There was a sign for the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, which was bookended by a couple of drinking fountains and a restroom. I was looking for a door that would open out into the next ring and was feeling pretty good about myself, which was when shit started to go down.
As I passed another security officer – a short, overweight guy with thinning red hair – he looked up and there was a scratching inside my head, a mental itching which made me very nervous and anxious all of a sudden. I knew that feeling: there was a Vu-Hak nearby.
He stopped and stared at me, squinty, as if he had a lazy eye. There was a thin film of sweat on his brow, and his complexion was pastier than expected even for a redhead. He reached out and took hold of my elbow in a firm, no-nonsense grip. I made an irritated kind of face and shook him off, but he re-grasped it and squeezed.
“Some assistance here, please,” he said, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the soldiers. “This is an intruder.”
I entered his mind and drew a breath. The sheer alienness of it almost overwhelmed me. Some primeval part of my organic mind, the ancient reptilian neurological remnant, was driving thoughts of ‘fight or flight’. If I’d still possessed an adrenal gland it would be producing adrenaline by the gallon and flooding my body with it. I knew this was just a reaction to the Vu-Hak, an instinctive fear that they instilled in me, and probably any human mind they encountered.
The alien w
as now trying to infiltrate my mind. I could feel its ghostly tendrils around the edges of my thoughts, looking for a way in, finding mental doors blocked but searching for nooks and crannies in the barriers I’d set up. My head became foggy, as if I’d just downed a full bottle of Kraken and oblivion was a heartbeat away. Every eyelash seemed to weigh more than it should and gravity had been turned up ten-fold. The world was blurring like a painting caught in the rain.
I had to do something. I quickly shut down the neo-amygdala that was mapped onto my machine cortex. Clarity returned like clouds parting for the sun after a storm.
I was able to think straight again but almost immediately everything became heavy, from my arms to my feet. My head wanted to loll from one side to the other and my eyes closed, welcoming the brief darkness.
Sleep was coming.
I needed to do something extreme or I was going to lose the battle for my mind.
And the war.
THIRTY-TWO
The Vu-Hak in human form was still holding my elbow when I reached out and grabbed him by the throat. Power flowed smoothly through my arm and I squeezed. Everything under my fingers disintegrated as the muscles, larynx and cervical spine vertebrae of his neck were crushed. The lights in his eyes went out as the blood flow to his brain ceased, almost as if he’d been physically decapitated, which I guess he pretty much had been.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
As I lowered him gently to the floor the thought that I’d just killed a man made me sick to my stomach. Deep down I knew he’d been beyond help since the Vu-Hak took him over, but it still pained me to have carried out what seemed like a murder. I’d gambled that if the human host was killed instantly, the Vu-Hak wouldn’t have time to disengage and would die too.
There was no time to dwell on this. The soldiers started to bring their guns to bear and the security guards began to unholster their sidearms. Leaping to my feet, I wrenched the M16 out of Armstrong’s hands and snapped it in two, wood and metal stock bending like licorice. His partner cleared his holster but I batted the sidearm away like swatting a fly. The security guard who’d been looking at his phone was rising out of his chair when I backhanded him on the side of his head, trying to control the amount of force I was using. He cartwheeled over the barrier into his computer terminal, tumbling onto the floor and sliding into the wall. The other security guard had also now brought his gun out but I was on him like a spider on a fly, ripping it out of his hand and smashing him into the ground with another swing of my arm.
One of the soldiers crash-tackled me from behind, obviously hoping to knock me over and take me to the ground. I didn’t move an inch and it must have felt like he was trying to wrestle a statue. His partner swung a punch at my face but his fist crumpled on impact and he let out a piercing scream. Armstrong released his grip and took a few steps back. His face was pale, his eyes wide, fear painted over his features like a geisha mask. He held both hands out and backed away.
“What are you?” he said.
I ignored him and secured the immediate area. The access corridor was still empty but wouldn’t remain that way for long, so I pulled the doors shut, reached into the electronic lock with my mind, and fried the circuits. Hopefully any staff needing to get to the next ring would just move down the corridor to another access point.
Armstrong was now leaning against the wall, watching me like a hawk. The other soldier looked at me like I was a monster, which I supposed from his perspective wasn’t far from the truth. He was holding his ruined hand and rocking, letting out little whimpers. The security guards were out for the count.
I kneeled next to Armstrong, who shrank away from me as far as he could go, twisting into the wall as if it would absorb him into the next room. I probed his thoughts, skirting areas of no interest, looking past Army conditioning anything that could help me. And there it was: a map of the B-Ring showing an unmarked sub-level where there were holding facilities, operations rooms and almost certainly Hubert, Stillman and Hamilton.
“Where’s the elevator to this sub-level?” I growled.
Without hesitation he said, “Next to room 1B834.”
Which in itself was puzzling. How would he know of the secret elevator? He was just a gatekeeper at the outer ring and expendable, if my reading of the Vu-Hak’s intentions were correct. The trap was being sprung … but they still weren’t expecting me, were they?
I had an idea. “Take your BDUs off,” I said.
His eyes became even wider but before he could even think about protesting I leaned in.
“Now.”
He shuffled up on one leg, taking his boots off first and then unbuttoned his pants, followed by his tunic, never taking his eyes off me. After he’d handed them over I flooded his mind with anxiolytic proteins. He grunted and slid to the floor in a deep sleep. I did the same to the rest of the security team, which took more effort than I was expecting, and pulled on his uniform. The fit was tight but worked, and the tall boots meant that my extra inches in height weren’t that noticeable. I tucked my bangs behind my ears and put his beret on. There was a window on the wall near the door and I stared at my reflection in the glass for a few seconds, straightening my hair further and manipulating the beret and doing up the buttons until I was sure I looked – at least on first inspection – like a marine. I retrieved one of the discarded sidearms and holstered it, completing the look.
Before leaving I pulled the metal detector out of its attachments, rivets pinging in all directions, and wedged it against the entrance to the ring. I figured I’d just gained a bit more time, and I sure was going to need all I could get.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened out into the B-Ring. The midday sun beamed in through the long windows, but the air conditioning kept the corridor at a constant temperature. The floor was the same shiny surface, consisting of a Mondrian-esque pattern of rectangular tiles in white, grey and red. Along one wall were murals depicting various conflicts including WWI and II, the Korean War and Vietnam. Maybe Iraq I and II were still being constructed. Certainly there was a lot of empty corridor space. In contrast to the entryway, here there was a hustle and bustle of people walking fast, talking to each other, carrying coffee cups laughing and smiling as if they hadn’t a care in the world. I felt jealous as they passed me by. A couple of marines flicked a glance in my direction but basically ignored me. I inclined my head to them as they strutted past, but didn’t change my expression.
Just like a good marine.
Easing into the flow of the crowd I tried to analyze the people I passed by reaching out and touching their minds briefly. Due to the volume of people I set a finite limit on the time I spent reading each person. There was a moment when the voices and syntax became overwhelming, and I worked at compartmentalizing, locking each person’s thoughts into a separate mental room.
Impressions came and went, emotions and moods.
No more Vu-Hak, so far.
Another checkpoint came into view. Again, there was an arched metal detector flanked by two soldiers and a couple of private security guards. This checkpoint looked different, in that no one was even attempting to go past it. People were filing into different rooms or bypassing it completely via parallel corridors or going outside via an external door that connected to a landscaped area between the two inner rings. The sign above it read NO ACCESS UNLESS SEC CL 5.
The marines bookending the detector were carrying some kind of sub-machine guns and watching the crowd carefully. Sooner or later they would see me and wonder why a marine was standing in the middle of the corridor staring at them.
I took stock of what I knew.
Through that door was an elevator going down to the sub-level where my friends were being kept. Next to room 1B834. First floor, B ring, near the eighth corridor, room 834. So far, my presence hadn’t been noticed, although that wouldn’t be for much longer. I couldn’t detect any Vu-Hak in the area, but that could change at any moment.
All right, time to
go.
I strode right up to the checkpoint and stopped directly in front of one of the marines. His name badge read MULLINS, and he had a couple of stripes on his sleeve. He was a young African American, fit and relaxed. He looked me up and down, and his eyebrows furrowed. He was trying to reconcile the private Armstrong that he clearly vaguely knew, with the tall female private Armstrong in front of him.
I reached into his mind and dialed back his consternation and puzzlement. His facial muscles and forehead relaxed as I tweaked his memory and altered his perception of what he was seeing.
“Let me through, Corporal Mullins,” I said. “You have your orders.”
He nodded silently and turned to his companion. “Let her through. We have our orders.”
I felt slightly guilty, using the Jedi Mind Trick again, but it seemed the simplest way to proceed. It was also surprisingly easy this time. Maybe I was just getting better at it.
He gestured to a glass door adjacent to the metal detector, and I slipped past another security guard who barely gave me a glance. I scrambled the picture on the detector’s monitor and deleted the last four minutes of recorded images from the cameras pointing at the checkpoint. The guard reached down to twiddle with some of the controls, a look of consternation on his face, but by then I was walking briskly down the side corridor and out of sight.
This corridor was empty, the windows smaller, and the walls pale green. The first door on the left was Room 812. Forty seconds later I was in front of Room 843. Where was the elevator? Then I saw it. Five yards down the corridor was an unmarked doorway, flush and blending in with the wall. There was no handle, only a solitary call button. I pressed it and waited. After a few seconds the door swished open to reveal a modern elevator.
The descent was brief and the elevator opened to a darkened corridor. Floor lighting like you see in an airplane tracked both ways, and there were green and blue LED downlighters in the ceiling and at random points along the floor. There were no windows, wall ornaments, signs or markings of any description.