Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3

by J. A. Cipriano

  The elevator doors behind me shut with a whoosh, leaving me trapped in the tiny metal room. Awesome. Why hadn’t the guy with the eyepatch told me what to do now? Was I just supposed to stick my hand on the glowing pad and wish for the best?

  “Agent, please remove your glove and place your hand on the scanner, or we will have to begin the intruder protocol.” The voice intoned, though it sort of sounded bored.

  I wasn’t quite sure what the intruder protocol was, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it. I sighed, not sure what to do, when a thought struck me. They didn’t actually want me dead… right?

  I consoled myself with that thought as I jerked the leather glove off my right hand and looked at it for a long moment before placing my palm against the panel. Warm light flowed out over my hand and LEDs above me began to strobe all different colors. It would have been cool looking if my nerves weren’t so tightly wound together I was sure I’d explode like an over-stressed spring.

  “Identity confirmed. Abigail de la Mancha.” The panel beeped and turned to a shade of soft pink.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Donovan said, rubbing his chin with one slender hand. “The agency must really be slipping.”

  “Yeah… well—” I started to say before the floor beneath my feet opened up, and I fell to my doom.

  6

  “We wondered if you would show up here,” the agent with the huge, ridiculous smile on his face said. He wasn’t very tall, maybe five and a half feet tall and had short buzzed blond hair. He leaned forward on the metal table with his elbows. It made the cuffs of his cheap black button-up fall down to reveal wrists the color of milk. “Agent Phillips told us about your ‘interrogation’ but we didn’t think you’d actually come here. We didn’t think you were that dumb.”

  “Glad to prove you wrong,” I replied, looking down at my hands. They were bolted to the table so I couldn’t move my wrists. My feet were no better. My ankles were shackled to the chair I was in, which was, in turn, welded to the floor. There wasn’t anything else in the solid steel room. At least, nothing I could use to escape, or better yet, as a weapon.

  In fact, if I hadn’t seen the agent enter through a door, I wouldn’t have even known there was one. It had opened and closed like a magical portal in the wall, leaving no trace that it had ever been there.

  “What’s your play, exactly, Abby?” he asked, bushy blond eyebrows snaking up on his face. “We’ve tried to get you to come in for the last several weeks, and you just stroll in here? What gives?”

  “You guys shot Stephen.” The words sort of tumbled out of me before I could stop them. “You sent a killer robot after me, one that made it so I had to beat up an eight-year-old girl…”

  “So you’re here for revenge? To stop us? What exactly?” He shrugged and stood up, his own chair scraping across the metal floor. “Explain how coming here works in your twisted little brain.” He gestured at me. “You’re sitting there in your bra and panties. You have no weapons. You have no way out. Even if you tried something, this room would fill with gas and knock you out before you could even blink.”

  “The play is simple,” I said, looking up at him and smiling sweetly. “I don’t need to blink.”

  The restraints holding me in place opened, releasing me. The man backpedaled, a look of horror filling his face as he stumbled backward over his chair. He hit the ground with a clatter that reminded me of someone dropping a platter at a restaurant.

  I stood slowly, my pink hair draped over the front of my face. I took a step toward him. He crawled backward on his hands, which was a little crazy because he was supposed to be a trained agent, right? Weren’t they all bad asses?

  “If you’re waiting for the gas, well, let’s just say it isn’t happening.” I dropped down next to the agent and grabbed him by his collar, pulling him up toward me.

  “How?” he asked, eyes wide in fright.

  I jerked his keycard from his belt. “Don’t worry, no one actually knows I’m here. See, when I abducted Phillips, I actually took a bunch of his biometrics and implanted them in a chip in my palm. I added some code to, well, put me in isolation and delete the record of it.”

  “You mean…” he swallowed as I swiped his card on the door. It opened with a hiss. “You chose me? Why?”

  “I didn’t choose you. I just told the system to send the most junior analyst who had access to the files I wanted to see.” I exited the room and stepped into the empty hallway. “Congratulations, it’s your lucky day.” The door slid shut, locking him inside.

  To be fair, it had been a little more complicated than that, and technically, Stephen had given me the chip. We’d just needed a little biometric information to get the ball rolling since no one was going to be letting him inside.

  “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” Donovan asked, eyes roaming over my mostly naked body. “And I like the new look, very— down-on-her-luck hooker.”

  “I am clever,” I replied to my hallucination as I pulled open the door to the next interrogation room. Sitting inside was a cart full of supplies. Ah, the joys of government drones who follow orders no matter how absurd.

  A few minutes later, I was dressed in clothing that fit and armed with a machine gun and a taser. As I looked around the tiny room, I barely resisted the urge to spout off a snappy one-liner. Who would hear it anyway? My hallucination? Pass.

  “You know they’re going to kill that analyst right?” Donovan asked as I moved toward one of the terminals and swiped the guy’s card. “He probably has a wife and kids, or maybe a cat…”

  “Not my problem,” I replied, ignoring the guilt tickling the back of my neck that told me he was right. I wasn’t sure why I cared since he worked for the agency trying to kill me… but I did.

  “That’s my girl,” Donovan said, sitting down on the desk and leaning back on his hands as I surfed through the files until I found what I was looking for. I wasn’t quite sure how or why I knew my way around their network, but I did. It was probably thanks to the experiment that had turned me from Abby Banks Super-Zero to Abby Banks Super-Spy.

  The flit was located just a few floors away, and like I’d thought, it had backup upon backup. Still, most of the equipment was in one giant room. Since most of the backups were kept offsite, it’d take them a while to reactivate the flit, if say, someone blew the mainframe up.

  I reached in my pocket and patted the tiny device. I wasn’t quite sure how strong the explosive was, but Phillips’ files had said it should more than do the job. It was kind of crazy because all I’d done was put in the details of my target, and it’d spit out a device from inventory. If all of their stuff was this easy to spec, it made me wonder who had designed the system, and whatever events they had contingencies for. Did they have one for aliens or vampires?

  Either way, spending a few minutes joy-riding through their files just for funsies seemed like a poor use of my time, even if no one was supposed to know I was here. I stood up and pushed the chair back under the desk. As I made my way out of the room, I shut off the lights. You know, to save energy.

  “I know you just did that so it would take longer to find that guy,” Donovan said, jerking his thumb at the interrogation room door. “But I’m not going to press the issue.”

  “Good,” I replied, swiping the keycard on the exit door. “It’s nice of you to let me pretend I’m trying to save the planet one turned off LED at a time.”

  “Hello, Abby,” Stephen said, flashing me his perfect smile through the open door. His sapphire eyes gleamed as he stepped toward me through the doorway, one hand reaching out toward me. The door shut behind him with a whoosh, leaving us alone in the room.

  “How?” I squeaked, taking a step backward. My world melted away as I stared at him. He didn’t look sunken and injured anymore. Rather, he was his perfect chiseled self. His fingers touched my face, and my heart started going a million miles a minute. “I thought you died…” I murmured as a horrible thought struck me. I wa
s hallucinating. I was making it up, like Donovan… Oh god I was crazy.

  “I didn’t die,” Stephen said, pulling me close to him and wrapping one hand around my body. “Did you miss me? You know, after you left me for dead on the floor of a cabin in the middle of nowhere?” He jammed a gun into my ribs so hard that it hurt. I cried out and tried to push him away, but he held me fast. “I wondered if you’d try and use my chip to get in here. Everyone told me I was crazy, but well, I guess I proved them wrong, didn’t I?”

  He spun me around and shoved me forward, his weapon pressing into the small of my back as the world around me faded away, distilling into a hazy darkness.

  “Stephen.” I swallowed, trying to resist the urge to cry. “Stephen, what are you doing?”

  “Betraying you.” His words were like fire in my ear, burning me to the core and reducing me to cinders in the space of a breath. “I thought that was obvious, Abby.”

  The door in front of us opened to reveal so many agents I couldn’t count them. They were dressed so similarly in their body armor that they all sort of blended together into a throbbing mass of finality.

  “Why…” I whispered.

  “Because he’s a jackass,” Donovan said, leaning against the doorframe so blood dripped down his face and formed a mask. “That’s why you should have let me kill him.” He touched his chest with his right index finger. “I’d never betray you…”

  “You did betray me,” I replied, staring dully at the throbbing mass of people behind my hallucination. Only… only they weren’t pointing guns at me, at least, not in a way that told me they should have.

  “Um… duh,” Stephen said. “Get with the now.” He shook his head. “Honestly, I thought you were smarter than this.” He shrugged. “I guess everything special about you really did come out of a computer program.”

  The interrogation room where I’d locked the agent earlier opened just before I drove my elbow back into Stephen’s stomach as hard as I could. I hadn’t meant to do it, honest. Something about him completely betraying me made everything sort of distant and strange seeming. He buckled in slow motion as I spun on my heel, tearing the gun from his hand and thrusting him forward into the room full of soldiers as they surged forward.

  I fired, pulling the trigger in bursts and spraying the corridor with hot lead. Bullets tore into the soldiers’ riot shields as I threw myself out of the entryway and slammed my hand down on the door’s controls. Instead of closing, the door wheezed and sparked. Acrid smoke floated from the opening in the wall, and the sound of gears grinding to a halt filled my ears. Had they overridden the controls by force somehow?

  I moved, pivoting while the soldiers were pinned down just as a chair flew at my head. I ducked, and it crashed into the computer terminal. Sparks leapt from the display, arcing out in electric flashes as the blond agent strode toward me from the interrogation room.

  His eyes were distant and opaque as he looked at me, but this time a grin slid onto his face. “So you’ve come to visit me at home, Abigail,” the agent said in the twisted robotic voice of the flit. “My new programming tells me I should be honored.”

  I drew my own gun and fired at him just as Stephen’s clicked empty. The burst struck him full in the chest, tearing apart his clothing to reveal the bulletproof vest beneath as he strode through my hail of bullets like Superman.

  Soldiers surged through the door as I ran at the flit. He swung one meaty fist at me. The blow caught my shoulder, spinning me into a sort of broken cartwheel as I dove past him. Shots rang out, pinging off the metal all around me and bouncing everywhere. I spared a glance at the flit, even though I shouldn’t have. He turned, despite being pelted with bullets and moved to grab me.

  I scrambled to my feet as a stray bullet caught me in the hand. Pain shot through me, only… only it wasn’t as bad as it should have been. There wasn’t any blood. My eyes widened in understanding and shock. They were using rubber bullets… So they didn’t want to hurt me after all.

  The flit grabbed me by the throat and lifted me into the air. My vision went hazy as I pointed my gun past his ear and let off a burst that sent agents running for cover. Unlike their weapons, mine was filled with good old-fashioned lead. My other hand throbbed uselessly at my side as I tried to make it grip the taser.

  The flit’s chokehold tightened, cutting off my air supply and making everything distill into a single point. Stephen was that single point. He was moving toward us, heedless of the gun pointed in his general direction. He had a smirk on his face I could only classify as smug jerk. Was he counting on me not shooting him? After what he’d done?

  My fingers tightened around the taser, and I drove it into the flit. He spasmed, jerking like a broken mannequin as he released me. I landed flat on my back and rolled to my feet as I fired the machine gun down the hallway at Stephen.

  The bullets caught him in the chest and flung him backward in a sort of slow motion fall. He crashed into the ground, his shirt torn to reveal his bullet-proof vest. I threw a caustic glance in his direction as I sprinted forward, my body momentarily ignoring its need to breathe, or you know, feel pain.

  I slammed into the first soldier’s shield with my shoulder and rolled, spinning my body past him as I swept into the hallway and into the throng of soldiers.

  The door behind me finally slid down in a sheath of sparks locking me in the room with the soldiers. There was only one problem. The exit was on the other side of them. I took a deep breath, my mind snapping into focus as I drove forward in a burst of energy. Soldiers went flying as I punched and dodged and kicked. The exit grew closer, and with every step I took, more agents fell around me, but the only thing I saw was Donovan’s smirking face.

  7

  The blood of the fallen agents smeared my face and clothing as I stepped over their unconscious, broken bodies and out into the corridor. The door I’d come from was still sealed, so I wasn’t really worried about being shot in the back just yet.

  The first thing I noticed about the shiny chrome hallway was the temperature. It was freezing. The cool air swept over me, making me shiver even beneath my super-spy jumpsuit. Flashing lights were going off, but thankfully there were no sirens. That would have been too much, anyway. They obviously knew I was here already.

  I knew from my quick jaunt through the agency’s files that the flit mainframe wasn’t very far from my current location. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be very long before other soldiers came to stop me so I pressed some explosive jelly against the wall and hit the button on the detonator. I took off sprinting in the direction of the flit mainframe.

  An explosion rocked the hallway, nearly shaking me from my feet as I tore down the hallway. Hell, if I hadn’t known it was coming, it probably would have knocked me to the ground. A furtive glance over my shoulder made me suck in a breath. There wasn’t even a hallway anymore. It had been reduced to a twisted mishmash of metal and wires. Steam filled the corridor, spewing from a broken overhead pipe. I swallowed. That was a little much…

  “How many people do you think you got with that blast?” Donovan asked, “Ten, twenty? You’re really racking them up.”

  I ignored him and focused on finding the flit’s mainframe. If I didn’t hurry, not only would I be overwhelmed by reinforcements, but I’d start to think about Stephen, and if that happened… I wasn’t sure I’d be able to go on. Sure, he might have survived being shot in the chest because of his vest, but did he survive the bomb? Did I even want him to survive?

  He had betrayed me, but something told me that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t his fault. He’d clearly been captured by the agency, and they had to have done something to him, right? They just had to have…

  An agent stepped out from the corner, gun leveled at me, but before I could even think, I fired at him. Two quick bursts that took his legs out from under him. My heart slammed in my chest as I ran up and soccer kicked him in the head. The faceplate on his helmet cracked as he flopped bonelessly on his back. “How da
re you people force me to… to…” I kicked him again, my foot hitting him hard in the stomach.

  “To kill Stephen yourself, in cold blood?” Donovan offered behind me. “It shouldn’t bother you. I know you thought he was different from me, but he wasn’t.” Donovan’s smile made me trembled because I was worried he was right.

  “You don’t know that,” I replied, turning away from him and stepping over the body of the fallen agent.

  “I don’t need to know that,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s either that, or you killed your true love when he could have been saved.” His voice brightened. “Oh, I hope it’s the second one.”

  “He was far enough away from the blast. He should be fine…” Even as I said the words a tremble overtook me and I had to grab the wall to help my shaking knees support my weight.

  “Just keep telling yourself that.” He sidled up next to me as I began walking, one hand leaning on the wall as tears rimmed my eyes. “Don’t worry. I know you will, so I’ll bring this up again, later.”

  The elevator in front of me was huge and daunting. I was pretty sure it was used for hauling supplies, but it looked like it could fit a couple elephants. I pressed the down button, but unfortunately, there was no response. I hadn’t been sure if I was actually going to take it or not, but I was going to cross that particular bridge when it opened. Now that option was decidedly off the table.

  “It figures,” I mumbled, reaching into my belt and pulling out a pry bar. I wedged it into the opening and pushed with all the strength I could muster. At first the doors didn’t move, then they jerked open with a rush, so I was left staring at an empty elevator shaft through a two and a half foot space.

  I took a deep breath and stuck my head inside, but a quick glance up and down the shaft revealed no elevator, though that could have been because I couldn’t see more than a few feet in either direction. I pulled off one of my flares, lit it, and looked around one last time.