by Wesley Cross
A loud, white noise flooded the room as the image on the screen disappeared, replaced by a gray static of a dead channel.
“What just happened?” Schlager said.
Connelly ignored him as his phone vibrated with an incoming message. He gripped the screen hard as he processed the information.
“Mike?” He heard Hunt’s voice. “What’s wrong? Oh, never mind, I see it, too.”
“Everybody out of the building, now,” Connelly shouted as he dashed to the elevator. “Come on. There’s been an explosion. Move it.”
“You heard the man,” Hunt said, gesturing to his friends.
Connelly ushered everyone inside and planted his hand onto a biometric screen. “You might want to hold on to something.”
A large countdown window appeared on the elevator control panel, accompanied by a disembodied female voice. “Emergency descent. Please hold on to the railing. Three, two, one.”
The floor seemed to fall out from under their feet as the steel box plunged from the eighty-sixth floor, accelerating to thirty-five miles per hour. Connelly grimaced as his ears painfully popped, but that was a small price to pay in the event of an emergency. He glanced at the floor counter—twenty more to go.
A loud bang came from above and the lights inside the elevator flickered and then went out, plunging them into the dark. A screeching sound cut through the air as emergency brakes kicked in, bringing them to an abrupt halt. Someone fell on him and Connelly instinctively held on to the person, trying to prevent them from hitting the ground. Emergency lights blinked to life a moment later, revealing Schlager’s embarrassed face as the man tried to disentangle himself from Connelly’s grasp.
“Sorry, man,” Max said, finally picking himself up.
“All good.” Connelly punched a three-digit code into the panel and the doors slid an inch apart, far enough for him to see outside, without putting passengers at too much risk.
“Could’ve been worse,” he said, looking at the gap. The elevator had stopped halfway through the floor, but there was enough space to climb out. “Jason, give me a hand.”
They pulled the doors apart, and he ducked under the ceiling to jump down. He took a quick assessment of the surroundings. There was some broken glass on the floor and small pieces of debris, but the damage seemed minimal. There was a faint smell of smoke and that worried him more at the moment.
“Come on,” he said, motioning to the group. “It’s safe for now.”
He helped Chen jump down first, followed by Schlager and then Hunt.
“Are you getting anything?” Hunt asked. “All my systems are blind.”
“Nope,” Connelly said, looking at the screen of the phone. “Pretty sure we are being jammed. Let’s not linger here. Let’s go.”
He headed toward the stairwell, motioning to the others to follow. The door under the Exit sign was ajar and Connelly removed a gun from a holster before entering the stairwell.
“Hang on.” Hunt motioned to him to stop. “I can hear someone coming.”
Someone screamed, a terror in the man’s voice coming from down the stairs, abruptly cut off by a quick tapping of an automatic weapon.
“Shit.” Connelly spun on his heels and pulled the door open to the nearest office. A small plastic table and a few light ergonomic chairs around it. Nothing remotely heavy to barricade the door to the stairwell. “Let’s try the other side of the building.”
“I disagree,” Hunt said. “I hear only four hostiles on this side coming up, and I don’t hear anything fancy. We can easily take them. And we’ll be much closer to the cars when we get to the garage. From the other stairwell, we’ll have to go all around the building.”
“But they know we are here.”
“They probably do,” Hunt agreed. “I think they can see where the elevator stopped, but it doesn’t change much.”
Connelly looked at him and then back at the door. He hated the idea of having to engage four unknown hostiles with the man he was supposed to protect, but Jason had a point.
“All right,” he said, making a decision. “Helen, Max, go back to the lobby and stay behind the wall. Do not come out unless you hear from us. Jason, you go in that office.”
“And you?”
“I’ll stay by the door.”
“Okay.” Hunt walked across the hallway to the door. “But I have a better idea.”
Before Connelly could say anything, he saw as Hunt shook his right bionic arm and pulled the door wide open.
“What the—”
Hunt stepped out on the landing and hopped over the handrail, disappearing a flight below. Connelly rushed after the man in time to hear a momentary burst of automatic fire.
“It’s all clear,” Hunt shouted, leaning over the handrail. “You can call the guys.”
“Why am I protecting you again?” Connelly asked, looking at four crumpled bodies splayed on the steps below Jason.
“You keep on insisting.” Hunt winked. “Come on.”
“Wait.” Helen caught up to Connelly with Schlager in tow. She stopped with a vacant look on her face, apparently accessing her built-in systems. “Let me check the cameras in the stairwell.”
“I told you to stay behind. Does anyone… Never mind. Let’s go.”
“It’s clear for now.” He heard Chen’s voice as he started down the stairs. “Garage seems to be empty, too.”
“Stay behind me,” he barked as he passed Jason. “And watch those two.”
They ran down the stairs in a single file, with him in front and Schlager in the back. A few minutes later, they descended into a small, windowless lobby. A large double door painted in a utilitarian gray had a large GARAGE sign on top of it. An emergency box was installed by the door, a fire extinguisher and a fireman’s ax with a bright-red handle hanging on the black felt behind the glass. Connelly broke the glass with his elbow, unhooked the ax, and handed it to Schlager. “Just in case.”
He pushed the door an inch and entered the garage, sweeping the open space with a barrel of a HK Mark 23. The fire alarm blared in the distance, bouncing off the concrete walls. A red light blinked on the farthest wall in unison with the sound, throwing a reddish glow over parked vehicles.
“Mike.” He heard Jason yell behind him, but he already saw it: a shimmering human figure was moving toward them between the rows of cars.
It was still far, almost leisurely strolling across the concrete floor, and for a second Connelly thought it was Martin. But the man was of an average size rather than the hulking bulk of the cyborg. There were no visible weapons except a scintillating blade with a long, straight hilt in the man’s outstretched right hand. The sword, with a slightly curved edge and the tip cut at a forty-five-degree angle, resembled a Japanese katana.
Connelly’s index finger moved to the trigger as he put the ghostly silhouette dead center in his sights. The man didn’t slow down, oblivious to the gun pointed at it.
“Go back,” he yelled at the group. “We don’t want to engage this thing.”
In his peripheral vision, he saw Jason ignore his order and move to flank the enemy. Connelly cursed under his breath and squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession, seeing as .45 ammo hit the center mass of the target. Circular ripples appeared on the flickering surface of the hitman where the bullets hit, but otherwise seemed to have no effect on the adversary.
Then, without a warning, the figure broke into a run, flicking his left wrist in Connelly’s direction. All sounds disappeared as Connelly’s body seemed to be ripped off the floor by an invisible force and thrown against a concrete wall. As he slid down to the ground, he saw the cars on either side of him pushed aside by a powerful blast. There was no pain, not yet, just the sensation of air being knocked out of his lungs and a high-pitched ringing in his ears that drowned all other sounds.
“No,” he mouthed as Jason Hunt came into his view, his bionic arm moving at inhuman speed to connect with the assassin’s head.
The man bent b
ackward at an impossible angle and then his right hand swung the blade in a short, deadly arc, slicing through Jason’s thighs. The assassin spun around, letting the momentum carry him full circle, and then brought the sword down again, cutting clean through Hunt’s left shoulder. As Connelly’s vision dimmed, time seemed to freeze for a moment as Jason Hunt and the glowing figure in front of him stood still. Then Jason fell backward, his legs and left arm falling away from the torso.
Like a house of cards, Connelly thought. Then everything went black.
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Thank you for reading THE LOOP, the third book in THE UPGRADE series. I hope you enjoyed it. The universe of the series continues to expand with three more books coming out in the next two years.
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Also by Wesley Cross
THE UPGRADE SERIES
BOOK 1. THE BLUEPRINT
BOOK 2. VERTIGO
BOOK 3. THE LOOP
ROGUE (A short story)
BOOK 4. SPARE PARTS
BOOK 5. FATA MORGANA (2021)
BOOK 6. DEUS EX (2022)
Copyright © 2021 by Wesley Cross
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