Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Why let me run then?” I asked as a horrible, sinking feeling skittered across the back of my lizard brain.

  “They’re probably training you.” Chuck shrugged, but his eyes were strangely distant, like he was watching a long forgotten scene play out. “But don’t ask me for what. I really have no idea.”

  21

  Our trip through the grimy sewers was, thankfully, uneventful. I wasn’t sure if that was because there were no defenses down here or because Chuck had cut the power. Though, knowing the Agency, I was inclined to think it was Chuck’s doing. If not, they were far dumber than I’d been giving them credit for. Then again, they had been routed in a matter of hours by a socially awkward Asian teenager named Lisa.

  Lisa was smart, sure, but it seemed crazy she could take over an Agency base so completely in so short of a time. How had she done it? And if she was that good now, how the hell were we supposed to stop her from killing us and moving on? I glanced up to see Chuck and Roberto whispering to each other, and even though I couldn’t make out their words, they seemed worried. Great, just great.

  Even super soldier Chuck was concerned. He’d been at this a long time, and maybe, just maybe, this was how he got every time he infiltrated some psycho’s base and tried to take her out. Still, I doubted it. He’d taken me down without even breaking a sweat, and he was doing a lot more than sweating now.

  “So… uh… what do you plan on doing after this is over?” I asked in an attempt to quell the fear rising in my gut like a serpent.

  “I plan on finding a nice beach and kicking back with my daughter,” Roberto said, glancing at me. “I may even let her drink even though she’s underage.” I scowled at him and Chuck laughed.

  “What about you, Chuck?” I asked, catching up to them. It was kind of funny because between the two of them they were so wide, they couldn’t actually walk next to each other in the sewer tunnel. It made it so Roberto was actually standing a foot or two behind Chuck as they moved along the slime covered floor, boots squelching with every step.

  Yeah, it smelled, but I’d gotten over that a few minutes ago. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, but I’d sort of willed the smell away and it’d worked. Whether that was good or bad, I wasn’t sure, but I was praying it was just a perk of whatever Gabriella had done to me.

  “Well, I think I’m going to take my dog to a park where I’ll hit on the first girl who comes up to pet him. Then I’ll go find an evil warlord willing to pay me my weight in gold.” He shrugged. “Though I could be talked into taking you drinking.” He grinned mischievously at me.

  “Ugh,” I replied, sticking my tongue out at him. “You’re soooooo old.”

  He flexed at me, his arms bulging so they made a pair of twenty inch pythons look like a pair of garden snakes. “What?” He called. “I can’t hear you over these guns.”

  Roberto shook his head as we came to the end of the tunnel. A huge stone wall blocked any further progress. In the center of the grey rock was a single red button. I wasn’t sure why, but that button gave me a bad feeling.

  Without saying a word, Chuck pressed his thumb against the button, and as it depressed into the stone, my breath caught in my throat. What if it exploded, or worse, filled the tunnel with poison gas. Hell, for all I knew it could release a billion poisonous spiders.

  When nothing happened, I exhaled slowly through my teeth. Blue light burst from a panel in the ceiling above Chuck’s head, scanning him from head to toe in an instant. A loud beep, beep crackled from a speaker somewhere behind me, and the wall to our left vanished to reveal a set of yellow plastic stairs that led both up and down.

  “Well, that was sort of unexpected,” I said as Chuck moved toward the door, his head craned toward the opening as though he was listening for something. He glanced at me and made a shushing motion with his finger. Then he sniffed like a dog, his nostrils flaring outward.

  “Gas,” he said. “It’s mostly dissipated so we should be fine, but if I had to guess, someone triggered one of the fail-safes to activate the nerve gas. I’m betting that was Tom. It seems like something he’d do.”

  He took a deep breath and stepped into the corridor, vanishing down the steps and into the shadows. Roberto looked at me and was about to say something, but I waved him off. What was he going to do, try and comfort me? What would be the point? Good or bad, we were going to enter a base where everyone inside had been horribly murdered by poison. There wasn’t exactly a way to sugar coat it. The worst part was, even if Lisa hadn’t done it, she had helped Tom. How could I bring her back from something like that?

  Roberto nodded and waved for me to go ahead of him. I wasn’t sure whether he was being nice or if he just wanted to keep me in between him and Chuck. Either way, it seemed like a good idea to me. I liked the idea of having the guy with the machine gun at my back and a Nazi-punching super soldier at my front. If someone got me through that, I was in trouble. Well, more than I was already in at least.

  I caught up to Chuck as he stood outside a black wrought-iron gate. It had been blasted open. The tips of the metal surrounding the misshapen hole were melted into slag. I sucked in a breath as he stepped through the hole, hands raised in front of him for balance.

  Was this how Lisa and Tom had gotten inside? If it was, that seemed bad. Wouldn’t this be the first place they’d look for us? As Chuck moved, a camera descended from the far corner of the room swiveled to lock in on him.

  “Chuck, if you take another step, I will bury that room under a billion tons of rubble.” Tom’s voice hissed from speakers all over the room.

  “No, you won’t,” Chuck replied, not bothering to stop as he reached up and grabbed hold of the camera. He jerked downward, and the machine tore free of the ceiling with a spray of sparks. With a nonchalant shrug, he tossed it backward over his shoulder. It hit the white tile floor with a clang.

  “I’m not sure that was a wise idea,” Roberto said as Chuck pushed open the door.

  “There’s no main power. He doesn’t have the capability to detonate the base anymore.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, scrambling through the room as quickly as I could and meeting Chuck in a long narrow hallway. It was eerily white, from floor to ceiling, reminding me of something out of a B-grade horror movie.

  “About eighty percent sure.” He shrugged and started down the hallway. “They could have rerouted the power already, but being that they have to be in here to do that, I sincerely doubt they are going to bring the base down on themselves.”

  “All and all that seems totally reasonable,” I said as Roberto appeared in the hallway behind me, his machine gun glinting like a polished star in the obscenely bright light.

  “I wouldn’t worry about them blowing up the place anyway. For one, they’ll want to keep the base in one piece so they don’t have to travel five hundred miles to the next one. That’s assuming we’re worth a base to them. We might be, but we’d have to get a lot closer for them to even consider it.” Roberto put a hand on my shoulder and shot me a smile that made a chill crawl over my flesh.

  “Sounds like we’re playing a dangerous game with a lot of assumptions,” I said, swallowing my fear and moving forward through the hallway. “Someone once told me that was a bad idea.”

  “That someone sounds like a smart guy,” Chuck replied. “But I’ve known Tom since he ‘joined’ the Agency. He isn’t exactly devious, or what’s the word I’m looking for, retaliatory? Sadistic? Yeah, sadistic. He’s more coldly practical. What Roberto said is sound. Tom won’t blow this base unless he has to. Besides, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Agency is scrambling to take it back over. He’ll be a lot more worried about them than us.”

  My bad feeling swelled into a hard lump in the pit of my stomach. That may have been how Tom was, but that wasn’t how Lisa was. She was smart, and she knew it, but she was vengeful too. I’d known her to carry grudges for forever and a half. Normally she didn’t do anything about them, but she was still mad at the kids who pi
cked on her in kindergarten. Now she was in control of one of the Agency’s bases and had somehow managed to use the internal defenses to kill everyone inside. Something told me her quest for vengeance wouldn’t remain in her head this time.

  I was about to say something to that effect when the emergency lights went out, pitching us into utter darkness. Something whooshed by my head, and I hit the ground as the screech of metal filled my ears. There was a loud whump, whump to my left. I rolled myself against the wall, tucking myself into the corner and moving forward on my elbows. I couldn’t see anything at all.

  “Guys,” I yelled, hoping someone would respond. I’d thought about keeping quiet, but I was pretty sure whatever was attacking us could probably see in the dark. It didn’t make sense to cut the lights otherwise.

  No one responded. That was scary, but I pushed my fear down and blinked a couple times, listening. Behind me, I could hear something skittering on the floor, a little tick tick that made my flesh crawl. I got to my feet, and sprinted toward the end of the hallway as a blast of light behind me lit up the room for an instant. Some kind of flying drone burst into flames, veering sideways as smoke and fire spilled out of it. It crashed sideways into another drone so that the second one spun out of control and slammed into the wall.

  There had to be at least ten more of them. As the light faded to shadow cast by dancing flames, Roberto put his weapon against his shoulder and let off another burst of fire that boomed like thunder in the tiny space. A drone exploded as lines of red laser light appeared on Roberto’s chest. He dove to the side as flames lanced through the space he’d just occupied and melted the wall into slag.

  He scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward me, turning every so often to shoot at the drones. Bullets pinged off their dull metallic skins, but for the most part they were able to dodge his fire and avoid serious damage.

  I spun on my heel, willing myself to move. I couldn’t see Chuck anywhere, but a door up ahead was lying cockeyed in its frame. From here it looked like someone had torn it free of the top hinge. If that didn’t scream Chuck, I didn’t know what would.

  I reached the door a second later and darted inside, my lungs sucking in mouthfuls of air. The room was semi-lit by a pair of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Chuck was across the room, wrestling with some kind of metal case. All around me, bodies lay contorted across the floor. Yellow goo dripped from their mouths and eyes. I resisted the urge to lose my lunch, but just barely. Had these people been killed by the gas? If they had been, it certainly hadn’t been a pleasant way to go.

  Even though they worked for the Agency, it still bothered me. I sighed. I was not cut out for the ‘whole murdering people indiscriminately’ gig.

  The walls felt like they were closing in on me as I took one small step toward the closest body and knelt down next to it. The woman had short brown hair and freckles spread out across her cheeks. Blood covered the front of her lab coat, staining it crimson. She didn’t look like she was that much older than me. The badge around her neck read Teresa Smith, and as I stared at it, the urge to cry for her nearly overwhelmed me. Would Teresa be dead now if I had just let Tom blow up those people outside Gabriella’s hideout? Would Lisa have gone crazy and killed her and how many others?

  Then again, maybe this was all Tom? Maybe he had done something to his daughter when they were alone in his lab. Yes, that had to be it. The Lisa I knew would never do this. I just had to find her and stop Tom…

  I stood up as Chuck finally got the cabinet open and pulled what looked like a solid black bazooka free. Roberto dove into the room and slid across the floor like he was trying to steal second base. Chuck dropped to one knee, the bazooka braced on his shoulder.

  “Fire in the hole!” he called and pulled the trigger. Fire and brimstone launched from the cylinder as the first drones appeared in the doorway. They dodged by the projectile, but it didn’t matter much. It slammed into the wall behind the metallic death machines and exploded with enough force to throw me from my feet. I landed hard on my back, my breath whooshing out of me as bits of flaming metal clanged to the floor.

  “Come on, Abby! Who knows how many more there are,” Roberto said, pulling me to my feet and half-dragging me toward Chuck before I got my footing underneath me.

  Chuck was standing in front of the cabinet, and as we approached, he tossed me a weapon that sort of reminded me of an AK47. “I didn’t want you to feel left out,” he said before turning away, his bazooka over one shoulder as he pushed open a side door to reveal more stairs. Joy.

  “If you’re wondering about the elevator, let’s just say I’m not super fond of enclosed spaces governed by a system that has been taken over by psychopaths,” Chuck added as he began climbing downward. All and all, it was a good point, so I followed him without grumbling… much.

  22

  I wasn’t sure how far down we’d gone, but I was beginning to feel like we were descending into the bowels of hell itself. With every step, the air got increasingly warmer so now it was like standing next to a blast furnace. My clothing stuck to my body as sweat dripped down my face. I wiped it away with the back of my hand and tried to take a deep breath, but the air was so hot it scalded my lungs.

  “So, where are we going? The devil’s lake of fire?” I asked.

  “That’s not too bad of a description, actually. See the secondary backup power for this facility is a thermal generator that taps into the magma below the earth’s crust. I can’t explain it in all the technical terms exactly, but the plan is to cut off that source of power. Having access to the base’s systems won’t mean squat if there’s no power.” Roberto smiled at me.

  “You could have mentioned we were taking a journey to the center of the earth,” I mumbled, glancing over my shoulder at Chuck. His skin was glistening like a well-oiled bodybuilder. “I’d have brought some SPF five million.”

  “If you’re too hot, you could always take off all your clothes,” Chuck said, from behind me. “I won’t mind.”

  “Dude, seriously?” I replied, barely resisting the urge to turn around and smack him. “Stop hitting on me.” I glared at Roberto who was strangely silent. “And you could tell him to stop, dad!”

  “Chuck, stop hitting on my daughter. She doesn’t like it,” Roberto said, though he didn’t even bother to look back.

  “She just thinks she doesn’t like it,” he replied before stopping so suddenly that the absence of his footfalls in the quiet stairwell was noticeable. I turned to see him point his bazooka at the stairs above. “Crap. Um… guys, you better hurry. I’ll try and hold them off.”

  “What is it?” Roberto asked, reaching out and maneuvering me down the stairs ahead of him. “More drones?”

  “Worse. Ninjas,” Chuck called, starting back up the stairs, one hand pulling a machete from the waistband of his camo-pants. “I freaking hate ninjas.”

  Roberto scooped me up in his arms and sprinted down the stairs so quickly I could barely process what Chuck had said. Ninjas? How the hell were there ninjas coming after us?

  “Um… is ninjas a code word for something?” I asked, trying to ignore the fact that he was carrying me bodily down the stairs as fast as he could. Before he could respond, an explosion boomed overhead and the stairs shook. Wow… they must have been close.

  “It’s code for ninjas,” Roberto wheezed as he leapt over the railing and landed on the giant black grate below with a thud that jarred the breath from my lungs. His landing had not been as smooth as Chuck’s had been earlier, that’s for sure. Far below, I could see orange murky liquid that looked suspiciously like hot lava.

  Heat so hot it made my skin flush an angry shade of pink hit me in bursts as Roberto stuck a small sachet of jelly against the wall on our left.

  “Like real ninjas?” I asked as he forced me into the corner and took aim at the jelly with his machine gun. “That seems a tad bit unlikely.”

  “They’re robot ninjas,” Roberto said, firing at the wall. The goo didn’t explo
de so much as it flared with bright purple light before vanishing completely. The wall crumbled to dust, leaving a me-sized hole in the stone.

  “Did you just say robot ninjas? Like that’s somehow better than normal ninjas?” I asked, not believing him.

  He ignored me. “Okay, all you need to do is go in there and shut down the emergency power. I’d tell you how to do it, but just trust your instincts, and I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  “Are you being serious right now?” I asked as he shoved me toward the hole. “You want me to go in there while you stay out here and what? Fight off the robot ninjas?”

  “Yes. You’ll be fine, Abby. I believe in you.” He shot me a wry grin. If it was supposed to inspire confidence, it failed miserably.

  “I’m not worried about that, I just can’t deal with this.” I waved my hand dismissively and crinkled my nose as I approached the hole in the wall over the active volcano. “Whatever, I’m just going to go with it.”

  Roberto smirked at me. “I think that’s probably for the best. Too much thinking never helped anyone in these situations.”

  I tried to dismiss the feeling I was trapped in a really bad action movie and climbed through the hole. A second later, I was standing in a room filled with whirring machinery. Gears spun and buzzers buzzed. It was so loud I could barely hear myself think as I picked myself through the mass of moving metal, looking for some kind of computer terminal or interface. After what felt like hours, I spotted a small screen embedded into the front of a control panel that read “Danger 12,000 volts.” That seemed like a lot of volts, but then again, the pumps in here were ginormous. Maybe they needed that many volts to run.

  I stepped over the yellow line on the ground and sort of shivered as I stepped past the red line as well. I wasn’t quite sure what they were there for, but something told me they had been put there for a reason. I tapped the screen embedded into the panel. It came to life, showing me a layout of the room filled with badly drawn boxy 3D art. Great, just freaking great. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath… and the sound of gunfire shot holes through my concentration.