Darkside Dreams - The Complete First Series

by A. King Bradley

  By some miracle, they reached the edge of the building without incident. No one called out in alarm, no sirens blared, no dogs were loosed to tear Oscar's balls off. He touched the concrete wall of the building, patting it appreciatively.

  "Over here," Lynn whispered.

  They climbed over a low railing and entered a maze of ducts and industrial sized pipes that snaked in and out of the ground and walls. Some of them ran all the way to the roof. There was an access ladder, closed off behind a padlocked cage.

  "We're going down," Lynn said. Oscar assumed she was making all this up as she went along, but he had seen enough to trust her judgment and it didn’t hurt that he agreed with her play.

  They found a set of stairs leading down to a lonely steel door with a dim yellow light glowing above it. The door was festooned with all sorts of warnings and notices. It was locked, and there was a number pad beside it for entering a code. Lynn was prepared; she pulled a decryption device from her belt and slid its needle-like cable into a tiny hole on the top of the key pad. In a few moments, she had the code.

  They stepped through the door into a dimly lit and noisy cavern. Huge machines loomed everywhere, filling the air with the din of turbines and condensers. Lynn shut the door and they were able to take a moment to breathe. Even if there were any guards down here, the sound of their entrance would be masked by all the noise.

  Lynn checked her tracking map again.

  "The Unit is on the top level, it looks like," she said.

  "And Greyson is there too?"

  "I'm not a hundred percent sure, but chances are he's sticking close to his bodyguard. She hasn't let him down so far."

  Oscar smiled. "Then let's go fuck up her winning streak."

  They found their way through the basement thanks to a bunch of color-coded lines on the floor. Finally, they spotted an exit sign up ahead. Just behind it was a set of stairs, leading up. Ducking behind a dormant generator, they waited and watched the stairs for any signs of movement. Oscar took a deep breath to push back the nausea and fear. He tried to pretend that he was on an ordinary stakeout, following some guy who may or may not be cheating on his wife. He looked over at Lynn. She seemed completely calm and cool, except that she kept tapping her foot at the speed of a heavy metal bass drummer.

  No one came down. It seemed the basement was not a high priority. Oscar and Lynn left their hiding places and climbed the steps two at a time. The door at the top had a window in it. Lynn stuck her face up against it and strained to get a good view of the hall beyond.

  “Looks clear," she said. "Let's go. Quickly. The door straight across the hall."

  Oscar nodded. She opened the door, quickly but quietly, and they darted to the door directly across from them. No one cried out this time either, and they soon entered a brightly lit stairwell. There were more stairs going down, to a different sub-level Oscar assumed. At the landing above them, a big number 2 was attached to the wall.

  "We're in it now," Oscar grunted. "Let's hope the people who work here are lazy and decide to use the elevator instead."

  Lynn reached beneath her gown’s sleek skirt and slid a pistol from a thigh holster and threaded a long suppressor onto its barrel. Oscar withdrew his own suppressor and did the same.

  "Going up?" Lynn said with a nervous chuckle.

  "Going up," Oscar confirmed.

  They ran up the stairs, landing on their toes to avoid the loud slap of boot heels on concrete. Past level 2, past level 3. As they approached the landing of level 4, Oscar was feeling tired. His legs burned, but he turned his mind to thoughts of Catalea. Thoughts of what he wanted to do to the man that may have killed her. A surge of strength came to him, and he charged ahead of Lynn toward the landing.

  Just then, the door opened and a thin old man in a lab coat walked into the stairwell. He froze stiff, staring at the two armed and masked figures who were approaching him. The door slowly shut and latched behind the man.

  "Don't make a goddamn sound," Oscar hissed.

  The man was shaking. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down and his tongue twitched as he tried to think of what to say.

  "Don't hurt me," he finally managed.

  "I said no sound!" Oscar whispered sharply.

  He saw that the guy's hand was slipping into the pocket of his lab coat. Without thinking, Oscar slammed the butt of his handgun into the old man's temple and sent him crumpling to the floor, unconscious.

  "Shit," he said. "I wonder if—"

  He was interrupted by the sudden screaming of a siren that echoed through the building, nearly splitting his ears as it filled the stairwell. He ducked his head reflexively as the lights went from bright to blinding, and then faded toward blackness before suddenly surging back to the fury of the sun. A slow but dramatic strobe, probably meant to disorient any intruders. It was working well. Oscar's depth perception was screwed as he clawed at where he thought the handle of the door was but hit nothing but air.

  Lynn came to his rescue, pulling the door open and pushing him through. He heard the sharp snick of her silenced pistol as she put a round into the old man on the floor.

  Oscar looked both ways down the fourth level corridor. He didn't see anyone, but he thought he heard them. Shouting voices, hammering feet. Stumbling like a man who was both drunk and blind, his senses overloaded by the screaming siren and the drastic changes in light, he fought his way toward a random room and entered it. He suddenly smacked face first into a wall and fell onto his ass.

  Lynn joined him, shutting the door behind her and smashing the light fixture overhead with the handle of a broom. They were in a custodian's storage closet, a space no bigger than the bathroom at Oscar's apartment.

  "Nice dead end you've led us into," Lynn said. "At least the door doesn't have a window. If we're lucky, they might assume we continued up the stairs. Let's just wait here a bit."

  Oscar groaned. "The light..."

  Lynn reached over and flipped a switch on his goggles.

  "There," she said. "They'll compensate for changes in brightness now. You should see a fairly steady image. I thought you knew how to use these things?"

  "It’s been a while… Sit down or something, you're making me nervous."

  She sat down, perching atop a sealed bucket of spackling. She used the moment of rest to check her equipment, make sure everything was still accounted for. Finally, she pulled out the EMP grenade and turned it over in her hands. Oscar wished he could see the expression on her face right now. It was hard enough to tell what the dame was thinking even without a mask on her.

  Over the next few minutes, they heard a dozen or so people marching past the door. About half of them seemed to split away and enter the stairwell. The remainder continued down the hall. Silence followed. The screaming siren cut out. Oscar couldn't tell, but he was willing to bet the strobing had stopped as well.

  "What do you think?" Lynn asked.

  "I reckon they found the dead guy by now," Oscar replied. "They know someone's in the building who means business. They aren't calling off the search yet, not by a long shot. They just want us to feel like it's safe to move around."

  "So, what should we do?"

  "I say we move around,” Oscar said with a grin, as he thumbed the hammer of his pistol back.

  They stood, and Lynn cautiously opened the door and peeked through.

  "Clear," she said.

  Unfortunately, there was little choice but to use the stairwell. The elevators were probably shut down by now. The stairs themselves would be guarded. The only other way to reach the top level would be to find a window and try to climb, but then they would just get picked off the wall like dumb insects by perimeter guards posted outside.

  So they hit the stairwell door running, Oscar aiming down toward level 3 and Lynn aiming up toward 5.

  There was no one below. Oscar turned his gun to back Lynn up. There was no one at level 5 either. They lowered their weapons and glanced at each other. Obviously there was some trick being p
layed here, and it did not feel very good at all.

  "Going up?" Lynn asked again.

  They climbed toward 5 cautiously, checking all their angles, keeping their trigger fingers limber. No one appeared. Oscar realized belatedly that even the dead guy on the landing below them was gone. Only a blood stain remained. Someone would have to get in here with a pressure hose to blast it away.

  "Six is the top level," Lynn said. "That's where the Unit is, and that's where Greyson would be. We just have to make it one more level..."

  Oscar felt his heart thump as they turned the corner and looked up toward the top. He fully expected a last second ambush, a half dozen guys with rifles lying silently in wait. But the landing of level 6 was just as empty as the others.

  "This doesn't make any sense," he said.

  "I won't complain," Lynn replied. "Just as long as Greyson doesn't see tomorrow, I'll be okay with whatever happens to me."

  Oscar wanted to say "amen," but all he could think about was Catalea. It would almost be better if he knew for a fact that she was dead. He could go into this cold, without a fear or a worry for himself. But now he was a mess, his anxiety spiking higher with each level he climbed.

  "They definitely have some plan here," Lynn said, approaching the door to the level 6 corridor. "We just haven't seen it yet."

  She twisted the handle. It didn't move. She tried again, with the same result.

  "It's locked," she said.

  "I don't like this," Oscar said.

  "Neither do I. Let's go back down to five. Maybe we can find another way up."

  They retreated to the next level down. Lynn tried the door, and it popped right open. They hopped through, each of them covering a branch of the hallway. Oscar saw nothing but an empty corridor.

  "Look at this," Lynn whispered.

  He looked and saw a wall of furniture and lab tables blocking one entire end of the hallway.

  "It looks like we're being funneled," Lynn continued.

  "Like rats in a maze,” Oscar agreed.

  "But this may be a good thing."

  "How's that?" Oscar grunted.

  "It must mean Greyson doesn't have as many guards on staff as he'd like," Lynn went on. "He's trying to make the most of them. Gathering them all close to him. He doesn't have enough to patrol the whole building, so he's just having them all surround the most important asset; him."

  "Sounds like something he would do," Oscar said.

  At the same time, without a word, they switched their silenced pistols out for something meatier. And then they hurried along the hall to await whatever fate Greyson had set out for them.

  As they rounded the corner, the shooting finally started.

  Oscar and Lynn drew back amid a hail of bullets, scooting along the wall to a safe distance. Someone called cease fire through the din and the gunfire stopped.

  "Did you see how many?" Oscar asked.

  "Five or six. All in a line across the hall. They aren't hiding behind anything. But they have bigger guns than we do."

  Oscar nodded. "Nothing hit you, did it?"

  "No. How about you."

  "No. I'm fine. But I have an idea."

  He stomped his feet, making a sound like someone falling over. Then he constricted his throat, letting out a pained groan that echoed down the hall. Pulling his pistol back off his belt, he tossed it into the open as though signifying his surrender.

  "The door right across from us," he whispered to Lynn. "Go. Leave the door open."

  She saw what he was going for and rushed to follow his commands. Posting up inside the room, she waited and watched.

  Oscar continued making sounds of pain. Finally, he heard the soft scuttling of feet as the guards made their way slowly down the hall. As soon as he saw their shadow, Oscar turned the handle behind him and fell into the shadows of another side room.

  Five guards stepped into sight, staring down the hall in confusion. Only two of them were smart enough to still have their weapons raised. Lynn and Oscar targeted those two first as they came bursting out of hiding.

  Oscar swept his gun from right to left, Lynn swept hers from left to right. The recoil was hard to control, but Oscar did his best to keep the line of bullets on level with the guards' vulnerable neck lines. One by one they erupted blood and hit the floor. One of them was still grunting in pain for a long moment, but Lynn put him out of his misery with a burst of bullets through his visor.

  "That worked," she said.

  "Impressed?" Oscar asked, reloading his submachine gun.

  "Maybe a little," she replied, seemingly smiling based on the sound of her voice.

  "Well, don't be too impressed. That felt like the B-team to me. I doubt the rest of Greyson's errand boys will be as dumb as these ones. Let's move out before someone responds to the gunfire."

  They dashed side by side along the hallway.

  "There's an elevator just up here," Lynn said. "It won't be running, I'm sure, but we can still pry it open and climb the shaft."

  "I was afraid you were going to suggest that," Oscar admitted.

  She was about to make some sort of reply when two doors on either side of them burst open and a handful of lithe, blindingly fast figures emerged from them.

  Assassins.

  Oscar turned and raised his arm just in time to block a knife that had been headed straight for his liver. He grabbed the assassin's wrist and jerked upward hard, dislocating the shoulder with a dull popping sound. The assassin made no sound, even when Oscar punched him in the throat and kicked him hard enough to send him back four feet before he hit the floor. Raising his gun, he gave the trigger three quick squeezes.

  The third bullet went wild as another Assassin kicked the barrel of Oscar's gun. It went sailing out of his hands, struck the ceiling, bounced to the floor behind him. He wanted to turn and retrieve it, but in the time it would take him to do that the assassin would have carved him like a turkey. So he kept facing the snakelike little man, dancing out of the way of his knife. But each swing was getting closer, closer, closer... Oscar kept trying to reach for other guns on his bandolier, but the assassin kept slashing at his fingers.

  He was trying to give his partners a chance to ambush Oscar from the rear but Oscar didn't think the partners were coming anytime soon. He heard a crunching, choking sound as Lynn broke one of their necks, then a series of gunshots as she put a fourth assassin in the dirt. Now it was just the guy who was slashing at Oscar. His motions were getting desperate. Oscar could imagine the sweaty, ascetic face behind the mask. Probably thought this assignment would be a breeze, taking out an aging private investigator and some young woman who looked far too pretty to be much of a killer. Too bad for him. The son-of-a-bitch couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Oscar grabbed the assassin's wrist decisively, wrenched it so that the knife fell to the floor, then kicked the guy hard in the balls. The assassin somehow managed not to fall to the floor. He lurched back, cradling his wounded wrist, and was about to rebound toward Oscar for a second bout when Lynn put a bullet through his brain.

  "Jesus Christ," Oscar said. "What the hell was that?"

  “Stop wasting time, Oscar,” Lynn snapped, while she put another bullet in each of the assassins, just to make sure, then reloaded her gun. Just in time.

  The sound of marching feet reached their ears.

  "Hide," Oscar urged.

  As one, they fled through an unmarked door and found themselves in a lab filled with desks, computers, huge machines whose purpose Oscar could only guess at. The lights were dim but Oscar's goggles compensated, bringing everything into stark relief.

  There was another door on the other wall of the room, and it soon burst open. A stream of armed guards flooded in. Oscar ducked down, hiding behind a random desk. He looked around, expecting to see Lynn close by, but she was nowhere to be found.

  "Shit," he grunted.

  They stood a small enough chance together, let alone separated.

  Oscar breathed heavily,
still trying to recover from his fight with the assassins and the near-death experience of having a knife come within a millimeter of slicing his gut open. He found himself craving a coffee, a cigarette, a goddamn drink of scotch. Anything. But all he tasted was his own fear and the salty sweat that ran into his mouth from his upper lip.

  Someone fired. A computer screen on a desk just a few feet from Oscar exploded, showering the wall with shards of electronic parts. He ducked lower instinctively, crawling across the floor to a desk farther away from the fray. He heard one of the guards cry out in a muffled voice. It sounded something like "She's there!"

  Lynn had been spotted. She was in danger. Oscar had to help her.

  He reached up, scraping his hand along the surface of the desk above him, and grabbed a small stack of books. He tossed them over his left shoulder. They struck some other desks, knocking things over, pulling the attention of the guards in that direction.

  Oscar rose to a crouch, poking his head above the desk and taking stock of the situation.

  Suddenly, the room was filled with gunfire, lit with muzzle flashes and curious wisps of glowing red lights that darted around the room. The brief moments of quiet were shattered by the desperate cries of the guards. Oscar had no idea what was going on; he was disoriented, whipping his gun this way and that, trying to find someone to shoot. By the time he came to his senses, there was no one left standing. No one but Lynn.

  She walked toward him, breathing heavily and gripping the glowing red handle of her now blood-soaked katana.

  "Thanks for that diversion," she said. "It was all I needed."

  "Uh... don't mention it. How many guys did you just kill?"

  She shrugged. "I wasn't counting. Now let's go; the elevator is right up the hall."

  She led toward the far door, the one the guards had come through. They had to wait through blood and guts and the ripped bodies of fifteen men. Oscar looked at the sea of gore and felt a chill. Suddenly he was very glad to be on Lynn's side. And, for the first time, he felt a faint hope that they might actually pull this off.

  The elevator was right where she said it would be. They were able to pry its doors open together. Oscar nearly fell into the dark shaft beyond, but Lynn caught him and pulled him back.