His words rang in my ears, and I wondered how truthful they were because, at the core of it, I was trying to take down the Agency. I wasn’t sure exactly what they were all about, but I knew what my birth mother, Gabriella had been about. She had been about terrorism and world domination.
The Agency, for better or worse, was the only thing standing between people like Gabriella and everyone else. And here I was trying to stop them, trying to take them down because they were treating me like an asset? Maybe, maybe I was being naïve. Maybe we did live in a world where people like Donovan were needed to stop people like Gabriella…
“That is irrational and beyond the parameters of our engagement.” The flit regarded me through Lisa’s eyes. “Should I be trying to kill you too, Abigail?” Lisa’s head cocked to the side like she was studying me. It was odd because it seemed like a very human gesture. “How would you feel if I tried to kill you?”
Instead of replying, I flung my last grenade with all my might. Stephen’s eyes went wide as it struck the blown out hole in the wall and tumbled inside the room with the flit’s mainframe.
The flit stared at me, unmoving. “You say that I cannot die, Abigail. But I think you have destroyed me. That does not—”
An explosion ripped through the hallway for the second time, and Lisa Ann collapsed on top of me. The blast must have triggered some kind of alarm because sirens began whooping in the hallway. The elevator doors slammed together in a whoosh, trapping the soldiers inside, sealing them off from us.
A cloud of freezing fog blasted from the mainframe, frosting the metal in our hallway as whatever automated system inside tried to fast freeze the dancing flames.
I pushed Lisa Ann off of me as Stephen lunged at me, catching me in the stomach with his shoulder and pinning me to the ground beneath the force of his weight. My head smacked against the metal floor with a wet sounding thunk, and for a moment, I saw two of him.
His fist came down and pain blossomed across my face. He brought his gun around to smack me with it, and I raised my hand just in time. The blow struck my forearm so hard I couldn’t see past the pain shooting across my eyes like Fourth of July fireworks.
Stephen grabbed me by the collar and jerked my head up before slamming me back down on the ground. The fireworks exploded even brighter as my limbs lashed out, trying to fight him off. It didn’t seem to help. He smashed the back of my head into the metal again and something inside me crunched.
“Goodbye, Abby,” Stephen said, his smile ominous even through my blurry vision. “The next time you’ll see me, you’ll be strapped to a table while doctors poke and prod you.” His words sent a chill down my spine as the image of him still wearing that smile as he stared at me from the other side of a glass window filled my head. That’s when the truth of our situation filled me. Maybe Stephen had been turned by the Agency somehow, but either way, this was what he was now, a cold, unfeeling monster.
A gunshot ripped through the room. The sound loud and angry in the tiny hallway. Stephen looked up, startled, his eyes tracing toward the far wall. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn’t.
“What are you doing?” he asked before a second gunshot exploded through the room. Stephen pitched sideways, falling off me and crashing to the ground in a spray of scarlet. He clutched at his arm as warm blood spurted into the air.
Lisa Ann appeared in my frame of vision holding Stephen’s weapon. Her cheeks were puffy and red as she knelt down next to me and smoothed the hair out of my face. “Abby,” she said, but her voice was distant sounding, like a whisper at the end of a hallway. “Abby, we have to get out of here. Can you get up?”
“Okay,” I mumbled though that wasn’t really the right answer. Part of me was too stunned to think. Had the flit released Lisa, surely it had when the mainframe went up, but if so, where had Lisa learned to shoot like that? I was about to ask her when a flicker of movement caught my attention.
Stephen started moving slowly toward Lisa. He was crawling on his good arm while his bad one dangled uselessly at his side. Blood covered the ground around him, leaving a crimson smear on the metal that reminded me of a bleeding slug.
I swung my body around to intercept him. It was like trying to move through jelly. My fist caught him hard on the chin before slipping off. I fell onto my face as he crashed to the ground. It wasn’t enough to put him down, but it was enough to make Lisa Ann take notice. She bit her lip before moving over to him and putting the gun to the back of his head.
“How’s it feel, jackass?” she asked, and before I could do anything, say anything, she pulled the trigger.
9
Blood and thicker bits sprayed across the metal as his corpse collapsed lifelessly to the ground. Lisa stood up, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I can’t believe I thought you were cute,” she spat.
Instead of getting up and doing something, anything. I couldn’t even breathe. As I watched Stephen’s blood leak out onto the cold, unforgiving steel, a small part of me died along with him. I know it was dumb, but well, I had been hoping the Agency had done something to him, had turned him somehow. I had held out the hope that I could save him, that I could bring him back to me… but now that was impossible.
I tried to get to my hands and knees, but the room swam, and I had to grab onto the floor to keep from sliding off the world. My stomach sloshed and twisted. As Lisa Ann reached out and touched my shoulder, I retched onto the floor. There wasn’t much inside, so little came out, but my abdomen clenched up so hard that it hurt.
“Abby, he was a bad guy. He…” She swallowed a sob. “He took me right out of school. Just walked into the classroom and grabbed me. No one even tried to stop him, to save me… Then I was here, and he was talking about using me as bait for you, Abby. God, I thought you were dead…”
“You shot him. Just like that,” I mumbled as she pulled me into a sitting position. She glanced at the corpse on the ground and shrugged.
“Yeah, I did. He was a bad guy, Abby. He was going to hand you over to these people.” She gestured at the smoking facility as white fog reached out of the flit’s mainframe like ghostly white tendrils. “Something tells me that wouldn’t be good.” She pulled me to my feet, and I let her do it though I wasn’t quite sure why. “We need to get out of here before they get that elevator open.”
I turned stiffly to stare at the elevator doors. They were still sealed, but I could see them moving, like something was trying to pry them open. It wouldn’t be long. Somehow, that didn’t seem to bother me very much because inside I felt hollow and empty. Lisa Ann had killed Stephen, in cold blood. The how and the why of it sort of blurred away as I stared at the spot he had occupied. I could have saved him. I could have brought him back to me.
“No, you couldn’t have,” Donovan said like a snake in my ear. “He was evil. He was an agent like me. Our situations would have been reversed if someone just copy pasted our names in different spots in the mission docket.” His face loomed in front of me. “Would you feel this bad about me?” He grinned, showing his teeth. “Would you love, love, love me, if it was my job to save you and Stephen’s to betray you?”
“That’s not true,” I whispered, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually said the words because, well, what if Donovan was right? What if Stephen had been acting exactly as he was supposed to this whole time? What if everything was really a lie? What if it had been his job to make me fall in love with him? Could I really be that stupid to still believe in him? After everything?
I turned my head from Donovan and stared at Lisa as a chill ran through me. I did not want to explore that now, I couldn’t, just couldn’t believe it was all a lie, but, but if it had been real, and the Agency had done something to him… well, then I’d have failed twice over and who could I blame, Lisa? No… I couldn’t blame Lisa. Still, for some reason, Donovan’s answer seemed more reasonable…
“Abby… we need to get a move on,” Lisa said tugging on my arm with one hand.
“Okay,�
� I whispered and wiped my mouth with my sleeve, leaving a glistening trail of slime on the black jumpsuit.
Lisa smiled, a soft fragile sort of smile that reminded me of a china doll, and pushed Stephen’s gun into my hands. It was still warm. “You should probably take this. I saw you a minute ago, and it was amazing, Abby. How’d you learn to move like that?”
“Someone tried to overwrite my brain, and it went wrong. Instead of taking over my body, it imparted a bunch of skills into me.” I smiled weakly at her. “The rest of it didn’t take.” I touched my head with one hand. “I’m too dense, I guess.” I smiled weakly, but it was hard.
“So you know Kung Fu?” she asked, grinning at me. “That’s so cool!”
“Yeah and like fifty other martial arts too.” I turned away from Stephen’s corpse and wound up staring into Donovan’s face. Only it was unreadable.
I was about to ask him what his expression meant, but I didn’t because he was my hallucination and that seemed a little too crazy. Besides, what if he started talking about Stephen again? I didn’t have time for that right now. We had to get out of here. It was important that we got out of here before the situation hit me fully. Otherwise I’d still be standing here when they rushed in. If that happened, bad guy or not, Stephen’s death would be even more meaningless.
“Okay Lisa, let’s head into the mainframe and pray there’s a way out because as far as I know, the only way in or out of this hallway is through the elevator. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little beat up, so I’d rather not try to take down a bunch of soldiers while keeping you safe from harm.”
Lisa nodded and followed me as we made our way across the hallway, leaving the elevator and Stephen’s body behind. I fought the urge to turn and stare at him one last time as my boots crunched on the frozen metal. Icy fog spilled out of the blown up door as I stepped inside and looked around.
The mainframe wasn’t as destroyed as I’d have liked it to be. Sure there were bits of burned plastic and twisted metal jutting up from the center, but I was reasonably sure this mess could be repaired rather easily. For all I knew, there were fifty more mainframes just like this. No, that wasn’t likely… if there were more mainframes, wouldn’t there have been more flits? Either way, it seemed like this wouldn’t buy me that much time. If only I had more explosives...
A white pipe to my left was spraying misty coolant into the air, and while I wasn’t sure if it would hurt me, I was not inclined to find out. I approached the mainframe carefully, not sure if something was going to leap out and try to kill me. For all I knew, this room was protected by robot mice with lasers on their foreheads.
“What the hell is this?” Lisa Ann asked, reaching out and fingering a charred circuit board. She jerked it free from a tangle of wires and stared closely at it. “I’ve built circuit boards before, for radios and stuff, but this board is weird…”
“Eh?” I asked, glancing at the blackened bit of green plastic in her hand. “What’s so weird about it?”
“Okay, Abby,” she said, pointing to one of the gizmos embedded in the board. “Usually on boards, you have all sorts of things like capacitors and resisters and stuff. This board doesn’t have any of that as far as I can tell.”
“Then what are all those things on it?” I asked, peering closer at it.
“They look like smaller boards… I’d have to put this under magnification to be sure, but I think every one of these boards is made up of smaller boards. I’m not sure how many levels it goes, but it looks like at least two are visible…”
“So what?” I asked.
“So we don’t have things like this.” She shook her head once. “This can’t exist.”
“Earth to Lisa. We’re in a super spy headquarters. They had a machine that takes over your brain through Wi-Fi and makes you do its bidding.” I turned away from her and plodded through the room. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like there were any obvious exits, which made sense. I’d hoped maybe the grenade had weakened one of the walls, but it didn’t look like it had.
“That’s not an excuse for having something that shouldn’t exist,” she replied, shoving the board in her pocket and approaching me. “And before you ask, Yes, I am aware I was mind controlled by a killer computer, and no, I don’t want to talk about what it was like.” She shrugged at me. “So how do we get out of here?”
“I have no idea,” I replied though I felt a little silly. I hadn’t even thought to ask her what being controlled by the flit felt like. Some friend I was. “Like I said before, I’m pretty sure the elevator is the only way out.”
“Nonsense, those pipes have to come from somewhere.” Lisa pointed at the pipe spewing coolant into the room. “There’s probably a wire way up there where they laid the pipe. If we can get in there, maybe it’s big enough for us to crawl out.”
“How are we going to bore a hole in the wall ten feet above our heads before they get the elevator open?” I asked, still staring at the spot.
“Don’t you have a blowtorch or super spy wall cutter thing in that pouch on your belt?” she asked as the sound of shearing metal filled the hallway outside.
“No,” I replied, pushing past her and peering around the edge of the doorway. The elevator doors were only open about six inches, but as I watched it expand centimeter by centimeter, a canister rolled out of the opening. Green gas began to spew from it, and something told me, I didn’t want to breathe it if I could help it.
“Damn,” Lisa said from behind me and turned to hurry toward the back of the room. “Come over here.” She pointed up toward a vent above her head where the foggy coolant looked like it was being sucked out. “This still seems to be working, we’ll have the best chance to avoid the gas’ dispersion behind the filtration system.”
“You’re too smart for your own good,” I replied as I backtracked to her position and crouched down behind the wreckage and leveled my gun on the door. “Hopefully they don’t just decide to toss in a few more canisters once they breach the hallway.”
“We need to get out of here before that happens, Abby.” Lisa was staring at me so hard, it made me wriggle under her gaze. What did she expect me to do? Make up an exit?
“I know that. I just don’t know how to do it.” I glared at her, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore, she was staring at some kind of display attached to the flit’s system. Somehow, despite the screen looking like a windshield after an attack by a baseball bat, numbers were scrolling across it.
I was about to ask her what it meant when a thought struck me like a kick in the teeth. Stephen had gotten into the hallway before me, but I’d been in the elevator shaft. So how had he gotten to me? He had to have gotten in here another way, right?
I leapt to my feet and sprinted back toward the hallway. “There’s got to be a trap door or something in here. That must be how Stephen got here before me.” I glanced at the canister, but thankfully it’d stopped spewing gas. I fired a couple rounds at the elevator, and they pinged off the doors. I heard people throwing themselves to the ground as I reached Stephen’s corpse.
It was still warm, and a shudder ran through me as I flipped it onto its back. This wasn’t Stephen… no, this was an it, an inanimate object. That’s what I tried to tell myself as I began rifling through his pockets, looking for a keycard. I found it tucked under his vest, and as I pulled it out, Stephen’s mouth fell open in a silent scream. My heart leapt into my throat, and I fell backward on my butt with a shriek. Another canister hit the ground next to me, and I stared at it dumbly, my fingers clenched around the keycard.
Gas began to spew out of it as Lisa kicked it, sending it flying back into the elevator. “Hurry, Abby!” she cried, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me away from the body. She snatched the keycard from my hand and waved it in front of my eyes. “Where do I use this?”
“I’m not sure,” I whispered, slowly spinning around the room.
“I’m going to just run it on the walls and see if something opens,” Lisa repl
ied, pressing the thin keycard against the wall to my left and running it up in down in a sweeping motion as she moved down the hallway.
I threw one last glance at the elevator and fired another salvo when a door whooshed open behind me. I spun to see Lisa standing in front of an open doorway with a staircase running up and down. She grinned at me, her cheeks dimpling like a fairy princess. “Up or down?” she asked.
“Up,” I said, “definitely up.” I moved next to her and stepped past her into the stairwell. It was so bright it made it hard to see. Fluorescent light spilled into the metal corridor, making it seem cold and antiseptic. I leaned in and peered down the stairs, somewhat surprised there was no one in here.
“Why up?” Lisa asked, following me into the room. She swiped the card across a pad next to the door, and it slid closed, leaving us trapped in the stairwell.
“Helicopters are on the top floor,” I replied, heading up the stairs. “I’m pretty good with those.” I shot her a smile, but she just shook her head and began following me, the keycard clutched tightly in her hand.
“Something tells me a lot has changed since we last hung out,” Lisa said, quickly catching me.
“Just a little.” I shrugged. “Nothing to write home about.”
We reached the helipad what felt like hours later. I wasn’t sure why we hadn’t encountered anyone. Shouldn’t there have been soldiers zeroing in on our position? Hell, shouldn’t there have been booby traps everywhere? Our escape should have been like an Indiana Jones adventure, instead it had been more like a horribly tiring jaunt on a gym Stairmaster.
Lisa Ann slid the keycard on the mechanism to open the outer door and let us into the heliport. Three helicopters were parked there. Two were those crazy big military ones you see in the movies. You know, the ones with the chain guns being shot by the commando with a cigar in his mouth? The other one was a sleek silver number that was sort of bullet shaped.
Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3 Page 23