“How about you don’t move, miss, and I don’t turn you into a smear,” the guy said, voice calm and if anything, excited.
“Okay,” I replied as the woman slowly got up and shot me a look that could have melted steel.
“I’m not sure what they have on you, girl, but just let us take the director out of here.” The guy never took his eyes off me until his compatriot has leveled her weapon on me. “We don’t have to be enemies.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He had a point, but then again, the agency was keeping Roberto alive with their tech. If the director got abducted, maybe someone else would decide Roberto or I had outlived our usefulness. After all, what good was I if I couldn’t save the director from these guys?
“Look, I don’t want to defend the director or anything, but something tells me bad stuff will happen if I let you kidnap him,” I replied, and as the words left my mouth, a bullet burst through the space beside my left ear and hit the wall behind me. Only I didn’t hear it ricochet like it should have.
“No moves. At all,” the woman said, gun trained on me. I hadn’t even seen her pull the trigger. That scared me a little.
“Okay,” I replied as the man scooped up the director and threw him over one shoulder. I thought about doing something else, but honestly, why? It wasn’t like I wanted to help the agency, and I was pretty sure they would keep Roberto alive with or without him. “I won’t stop you.”
The woman nodded at me and backed toward the elevator as the man turned his back and stepped inside. I saw him rigging something up before he shot upward out of sight like Batman in one of those movies.
The woman smirked at me before pointing her weapon at me. “When you wake up, tell them Flash and Bang send their regards.” Then she blasted me in the face.
My last thought as I fell backward, untold amounts of agony enveloping everything I knew and sending me hurtling into unconsciousness, was that I should have hit her harder. Way harder.
3
The taste of rusty nails made me gag as I rolled over onto my hands and knees, struggling to keep my dinner from lurching out of my stomach and onto the floor. I shut my eyes, rested my forehead on the cool metal floor, and counted to ten in my head. Then I counted to twenty. I kept counting until the room stopped spinning, but I’ll be honest I lost track of the numbers I was counting a couple of times and had to start over.
After what felt like ever, I pulled myself to my feet and looked around. I was still in the director’s office. Chuck lay unconscious in a pool of blood just beyond the threshold of the room. It looked like he hadn’t moved since he’d gone down in the explosion, but I hadn’t remembered seeing him covered in blood.
I took a wobbling step toward him, and my eyes went wide in shock. He had two bullet holes in the center of his chest. I screamed and dropped to my knees, hands reaching out to try and staunch the blood flow. I wasn’t sure if he could even be saved, but since his chest was rising and falling, albeit barely, I knew there had to be some kind of chance to save him. Especially here in the agency.
His blood flowed through my fingers as panic seized me. “Please don’t die, Chuck,” I murmured. Then, I got angry with myself. This wasn’t the time to freak out and panic. This was the time to fix the problem. I could have a breakdown later.
My body went into autopilot as I focused on letting my downloaded superspy skills do their thing. It was always a little disconcerting when I did things like this because I was never quite sure what I could or couldn’t do until I tried. Thankfully, there had been a med kit in the director’s desk, otherwise I was reasonably sure Chuck would have died, expert field medic or not.
Even now, it would be a near thing. If he didn’t get proper help soon… well, I didn’t want to think about that.
Once I was sure he wasn’t going to bleed out, I leapt to my feet and made my way toward the elevator shaft. One quick glance revealed what I thought. The elevator car had been torn free of the cabling, and while I couldn’t see it in the darkness below, the torn cables at eye level didn’t exactly make me think it would be coming back up anytime soon. Damn, I’d have to climb up if I wanted to exit this way.
I made my way back into the room, shielding my eyes from the red emergency strobe lights going off inside. I wasn’t sure if the sirens had stopped or if I was just tuning them out, and as I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t hear anything at all. I swallowed, that wasn’t good.
My heart hammered in my chest as I tried to push down the fear swimming up in me. What had Flash and Bang shot me with? Why had they used that weapon when they’d decided to pump Chuck full of lead? Or were they just keeping their word? Would they have shot me the same way if I’d resisted?
It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then again, how was I to know the inner workings of a couple of psychopaths who thought they could infiltrate an agency facility. I mean I’d done it before too, but I was sort of a special case…
Chuck gurgled, and I tossed one last look at him before making my way to the spiral staircase. It looked like the only way out of the room, and as my feet touched the first metal rungs, I had the feeling something was very wrong, only I just didn’t know what.
About three flights of stairs later, I dead-ended into a hatch in the ceiling. I pressed on it but it didn’t move. I grumbled, slapping my keycard over the card reader by the door, but it didn’t even react. Was the power dead? If it was… what was keeping Roberto alive?
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself and nearly succeeding as I thought about what to do. Usually safety hatches had manual overrides somewhere… I ran my hands over the lip until I found a weird indentation in the metal. As soon as I touched the spot, I knew it was what I was looking for though I wasn’t sure why. Then again, I did a lot of things I couldn’t explain.
The hatch popped open with a sound like a champagne cork. When no gunfire filled the hole with lead, I steeled myself as best I could and threw myself out of the hatch with all the force my legs could muster. I wasn’t the strongest teenage girl on the planet, but a few months of training with a guy like Chuck will give you more muscle than sitting behind a school desk ever will, let me tell you.
I cleared the hole in a leap that took me into a roll along the steel floor. Sticky warm fluid covered my body as I came to my feet, glancing around in the nearly dark room. The only light came from a cracked computer screen in the corner, spilling staticy white light across the floor.
Even still, it was more than enough to illuminate the corpses shredded across the floor. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but from the look of it, the scientists and guards had been torn limb from limb. A shudder ran through me as I shut my eyes, forcing myself to go into my empty place. The one where seeing things like this didn’t bother me. It was a trick Chuck had taught me, and honestly, it didn’t work very often, which I think may have been a good thing. I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to be able to stare at a room full of dismembered corpses and feel nothing. Something told me the day when that happened would be a dark one indeed. I shuddered, turning away from the three scientists pushed into a haphazard pile against the far wall and made my way toward the computer console.
One thing was certain, if the computer screen was flickering, there had to be power. If there was power, not only could I call for help, but Roberto would be okay because the life support systems would be the last things to lose power. Besides, what kind of monster would intentionally kill machines designed to keep invalids alive?
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding as my fingers danced across the blood spattered keyboard. Nothing seemed to react for a moment. Then the lights overhead flickered to life, and the dark screen to my left came on. Red flashed across it along with a whole mess of symbols that basically meant we were operating on the fourth backup power system.
Damn, whoever Flash and Bang were, they were a little too good for my liking. I gritted my teeth, fighting the urge to punch them in the face because of wha
t they’d done. For all I knew, they had knocked out the systems keeping Roberto alive. A cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck as I tried to push away the vision of Roberto flatling in his hospital bed and leaving me an orphan.
It was sort of funny. Just a few months ago, people like Flash and Bang would have had me hiding under my bed, and now? Now, I wanted to find them and gut them with a rusty anchor just because their actions might have hurt my father. The crazy thing was? I could probably do it… both mentally and physically.
I glared at the screen as my humanity disappeared along with the emergency symbols, revealing a screen that told me the medical bay was still fully operational. I pressed a button next to the intercom on the wall and smirked as it crackled to life. I wasn’t sure why they had such a low tech system in place when they had technology that could implant itself in your brain, but it was what it was.
“Hello,” I told the intercom. “I need assistance in the director’s office. Chuck is badly hurt.”
There was no response for so long I nearly asked the intercom for help a second time, but just as I was depressing the call button, the intercom spoke up.
“Abby, is that you?” Doctor Amarang asked, his nasally, high-pitched voice strangely comforting due to its familiarity even though it was high strung and worried. He was the one in charge of Roberto’s care, and I’d gotten to like him well enough because of it.
“Yes,” I replied, thanking my lucky stars someone had responded. If he hadn’t, I wasn’t sure what I’d have done. “How is my father?”
“He’s okay. Those systems have been left alone, thank god.” At Amarang’s words, some of the tension filling me flew the coop and I breathed a sigh of relief. Roberto was okay. Thank god. Now there was just the matter of Chuck…
I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Chuck is hurt. He needs immediate medical attention,” I said, hoping he had a way to help me.
“I don’t think we can get to him,” Amarang replied and I heard the weariness in his voice plain as day. “Most of the elevators are down and a lot of hallways are blocked. Not to mention, we’re up to our elbows in injured…”
“I’ll get him to you,” I said even though I had no idea how I was going to go about doing that. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be easier said than done.
“Can he be safely moved?” Amarang’s voice rang from the intercom.
“It doesn’t matter because option two is to leave him there to die.” With those words, I released the intercom button and dropped back into the hatch. I sprinted back down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.
Thankfully, Chuck was still alive when I reached him, but his breathing was even shallower than before, impossible as it seemed. I looked around for something to hoist the massive man around and sighed when I realized I wasn’t going to easily be able to move him.
“Okay, Chuck. Here’s the deal.” I gritted my teeth as tears filled my eyes. “I know I said before I was going to go get help, but it turns out, I’m going to have to clear a path to you.” I knelt by him and rubbed his cheek with my hand. He was so cold, it nearly made me shiver. He couldn’t be dying, could he? No… no that wasn’t allowed. If he died… I swallowed as the realization hit me. If he died, it would hurt in a way I couldn’t quite describe. I hadn’t realized I’d cared for Chuck as much as I did in that moment. He was like the older brother I’d never had and the idea of losing him was too much. “I’ll be back. I promise. Don’t die.”
With that, I stood and walked toward the elevator shaft. The cables dangled in front of me and a strange sense of déjà vu came over me as I watched them sway. The medical wing was several floors up, but it would be more of a straight shot if I could just go up two floors through the elevator. If I went back up the stairs I would have to circle back through the entire facility to reach the medical wing.
I swallowed my fear as I glanced down at the abyss below. My heart started thumping in my chest as I crouched down, legs tensing.
“This is so stupid,” I said, leaping forward and grabbing onto the cables. My momentum carried me forward, slamming me hard into the steel shaft. Pain rang through me as I dangled there before getting my butt in gear and shimmying up the cables like a monkey. Thanks to Chuck, I’d had a lot more practice climbing up elevator shafts, usually wearing a fifty pound pack on my back. This was nothing.
I reached the next floor a moment later, my hands scraped raw and my muscles about to explode. The doors were blown inward like some huge beast had punched a hole in them and the sight made a chill run down my spine. What the hell did that?
I shouldn’t have asked.
4
Dale, the security drone, stared at me with one flickering red eye as blue-white sparks spit from beneath the metallic black skull cap fitted over the back of his head. The android took a wobbly step toward me, dragging one broken, robotic arm along behind him. The appendage caught on a tear in the metal floor, and the few wires still attached to the appendage strained before snapping free of the crevice in a fountain of sparks.
“Dale, thank god—”
The robot swung at me before I’d finished my sentence. His metal fist came at me like a battering ram and punched a hole in the steel beside my head like it was made of tinfoil. The droid’s good eye fixed on me as it retracted its arm, swiveling its body around to attack me like it’d done in training hundreds of time. Only this time, I didn’t get the feeling this was training. That was fine. I didn’t have time to mess around.
I dove past the machine as its fist tore free of the wall in a screech of metal. I wasn’t sure why the defense droid was trying to kill me, but I was willing to bet it had something to do with the weird device on the side of its head. Was that Flash and Bang’s doing? I sure hoped not. If they’d managed to turn even a handful of the defensive robots in this base, I was going to be in trouble.
The distant sound of gunfire brought me back to the moment as Dale thundered toward me, his broken limb trailing behind in in a cloud of sparks. I waited until the machine was just about on top of me before making my move. I put one foot on the swivel above its treads and hoisted myself onto its damaged shoulder. I gripped the metal plate in my hands and pulled as hard as I could. The robot’s head jerked to the side as the device came free in a spray of sparks. It’d taken a lot less force to dislodge than I’d expected.
My body tumbled to the ground with a thud. I lay there, trying to breathe as Dale’s metal hand came at me. Instead of moving out of the way, I took a deep breath and waited. I stared at the android for a moment longer, but it wasn’t moving anymore. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, but either way, I needed to hurry. Besides, hanging out with a million ton battering ram inches from my face didn’t exactly seem like fun.
I passed the broken machine and approached the far door. It opened up to reveal a dark corridor barely lit by emergency lights. Most of them seemed to have gone out, and as I made my way toward where I knew the medical bay should be, a loud whump, whump behind me filled my ears.
Something flew over my head followed by a blast of heat and flame. I turned to see a tiny flying droid, and for a moment, I was worried it was targeting me. It shot again, and I dropped to the ground as the blast passed harmlessly by me. The resulting shockwave, however, flung me across the tiny space in a heap. My hearing evaporated into a dull whine as smoke and debris filled my vision.
A quick glance revealed an army of werewolf-bots coming toward me out of the smoke. They calmly stepped around the mangled form of their lead bot as electricity arced out of its charred remains. I scrambled to my feet as one of the robots put what looked like a bazooka to its shoulder, and not even breaking stride, blasted the tiny aerial drone to bits. I shielded my face from the oncoming rush of heat and light with my arm, but even still I was sure I’d gotten a radical sunburn.
Katanas sprang into the hands of the remaining robots because robotic werewolves weren’t scary enough. No, these ones needed swords too. They surged toward m
e, revving up in the way they did when they’d caught sight of prey. My heart pounded in my chest as I hurled my body forward in a dive that carried me between the slashes of the two leading werewolves.
My shoulder crashed into the bazooka wielding one, knocking it backward as pain shot through me. Pitting my fragile flesh and bone body against the mechanical werewolves would not be a winning proposition, especially without my impact dampening training suit.
The werewolf wobbled as its friends closed on me. I shoved my pain down, gritting my teeth and pressing my feet against the joints of the werewolf’s knees as I fell backward, wrapping my arms around the bazooka and using my bodyweight to wrench it free of the robot’s grip.
I landed hard on my back and stars shot past my eyes, but I didn’t let a silly thing like blurry vision stop me. I pressed the trigger on the bazooka, aiming the weapon so the backlash of the tube fried the werewolf behind me.
Fortunately, the others dodged, throwing themselves out of the explosive projectile’s path. If they hadn’t, the resulting explosion wouldn’t have been good for my complexion or well, my anything, really. It exploded against the door at the far end of the hallway, heat and light flashing through the room and blowing my hearing to kingdom come.
I dropped the spent weapon, and sprinted toward the door. Already I could hear the machines getting to their feet. They would be upon me in moments. I dropped to my knees as a katana sailed through the air, so close to the top of my head I felt the wind of it whistle by, and embedded itself halfway into the torched metal doorway.
Another blade slammed down into the ground where I’d been, and I kicked out at the same vulnerable spot I knew the robots’ possessed. The werewolf buckled, toppling toward me, swinging one glinting metallic claw toward my most vital bits.
Meet Abby Banks VOLUMES: 1-3 Page 36