I Kill Monsters

by Dennis Liggio

  We dressed in the hazmat suits, sliding them right over our jumpsuits, which made me feel really bulky. We put a few things into backpacks, but otherwise our gear was under the suits. The masks covered us and made us anonymous except for our eyes. We had barely finished when a guy in a towel came out of the shower.

  "Oh, you guys are here kind of early," he said. "Your shift isn't for another hour."

  "We, uh, like to get here early and be ready," said Mikkel. I noticed our voices were much more understandable in these masks.

  The man in the towel laughed as he opened up a locker and grabbed his clothes. "I remember those days. I can tell you guys are new. You'll be fine, though. They're not that stringent on start times as long as you hit your barrel quota. Don't stress, guys, you'll be fine."

  "Is there a break room near here?" said Mikkel. "I want to get a donut before my shift."

  I turned and glared at him as hard as I could through my hazmat mask, but I don't think Mikkel saw it.

  "It's down the hall and on the left past the stairwell," said the man with a smile. "Just try to not look suspicious when you walk down there. I sometimes grab something while suited up, and no matter how much I explain I haven't gone out yet, everybody throws a fit."

  Mikkel nodded and left the room. I stood there awkwardly for a moment, while the guy started putting on his shirt.

  "I, uh, also want to a donut," I said and turned to leave. Smooth, Szandor, smooth.

  I found Mikkel down the hall actually in the break room. There was an empty donut box in the trash can and all of the day's coffee was cold.

  "Not even cookies," he said. "Not even cookies, Szandor! What kind of a break room hell is this?"

  "You don't even work anywhere with a break room," I said. "You don't even know what they're really like. Besides, why do you care?"

  "Donuts," he said simply.

  I sighed. "Come on, we passed the stairwell. And take this seriously, we're infiltrating the enemy. This is the belly of the beast."

  "I know," he said. "I'm just saying that other than the lack of donuts, it's not very beastly yet."

  The server room we were looking for wasn't on the level we entered. The sewer entrance was on B6. The server cluster was on B1. The Clark Building had a lot of basement levels. Luckily, our access card worked like a champ and we didn't find a door or stairwell it didn't work on. That changed when we hit the server room.

  I swiped the card a few times, but there was no response from the door. It didn't beep, nor did the light next to the scanner change color.

  "It looks like Smilin' Rick Molina was not cleared for server access," I said.

  "That makes sense, since he was a security guy," said Mikkel. "What now?"

  I looked at the door while Mikkel leaned against the wall. The door wasn't that secure. It was just a wooden door with a magnetic lock. It wasn't a vault. This door was inside their already extremely secure building, so the company only needed something basic. We could break the door down, especially if we used Mikkel's crowbar. But that would be loud and on their security camera. Plus, odds were that if the door was forced open there would be alarms. We needed to get in there to shut down security, but until we got in there, security would be very much in effect.

  I had started examining the door hinges, wondering if there was some more discreet way to get in when Mikkel hissed through his mask, "Cool it."

  I pulled back to a normal standing position and looked down the corridor. There was someone walking toward us. Collared shirt, his badge on a lanyard, three phones clipped to his belt, carrying a steaming cup of coffee. He had to be a sysadmin.

  The sysadmin smiled as he came closer to us. "Don't tell me there's a biohazard in the server room," he joked. "I didn't leave my lunch around for that long!"

  He chuckled at his own joke, probably realizing he couldn't tell our reactions through the masks and that he should laugh to have us covered. "I kid, I kid," he said. "I know you guys do some hard work. I can't imagine what it's like. I sit on my ass all day and still sometimes come home exhausted! But that's why they pay me the big bucks!" He chuckled again as he swiped his badge on the server room door. It beeped and there was an audible unlocking.

  Not seeing a reaction from us, the sysadmin opened the door and walked into the server room. The door began to swing closed, then Mikkel stuck his foot in between it and the doorjamb. "I call Good Cop," he said in his mask-altered voice.

  I gave Mikkel a withering look he probably couldn't see through my mask and grabbed the door. Pulling it open, Mikkel and I slipped into the server room.

  The sysadmin quickly turned around. "You can't come in here!"

  Not even pausing in my movements I punched him in the face.

  Like we said, we don't kill people and we don't like hurting people. We're monster hunters, we save our anger and rage for harmful creatures. But we knew also there was going to be some Nowak-on-person violence when we came in here. We were damn sure not killing anyone, but a little punching seemed okay. Sure he was the sysadmin and probably didn't deserve it. But we needed entry and we needed him to cooperate. He also seemed kind of smug. I hate smug.

  The sysadmin fell to the floor and put up his hands to ward off any further attacks. "Stop! Stop! I didn't do anything!"

  "And we're going to need you to keep not doing anything," I said, but it didn't sound so badass through the mask.

  "What?" he said, not understanding.

  I sighed and took off the hazmat mask. My badass retort had been ruined. "We're going to need you to cooperate. Do that and you'll be fine."

  "Who the hell are you guys?" asked the sysadmin.

  "Asking us stupid questions is not cooperating," I said wearily. "Give me your badge."

  "What?"

  "Your badge! Give me your badge!" I said.

  "Don't hit me!" he said, cringing and turning his face away.

  I rolled my eyes and walked away.

  Mikkel, his mask off, walked over and squatted down in front of our quivering IT worker. In a much kinder voice Mikkel said, "Hey, we really do need to get your badge. We don't want to hurt you or anything. But if you don't give us your badge, he's going to hit you again. Between you and me, I think he actually likes hitting people. So I don't think we should give him any excuses to hit someone, namely you. What say you?"

  Wide eyed and near tears, the sysadmin nodded and pulled the lanyard off his neck and handed it to Mikkel.

  Meanwhile, I had been checking out the room. At one end were the servers. Four large racks of servers hummed quite loudly. Huge fans were setup right in front of them. The rest of the room held just two desks, each of which had regular PCs. The only monitors in the room were connected to those computers. Luckily, Paulie had walked me through what we needed.

  Mikkel handed the badge to me. "We need to fine tune your intimidation techniques."

  "We'll see, Good Cop." I looked over the badge. The sysadmin's name was Nelson Bradley. "Okay, Nelson," I began, and noticed he flinched hearing me say his name. "We need you to remote into the server." Paulie had said specifically to use that phrase if we were trying to get help out of someone.

  "Why do you need to remote into the server?" asked Nelson.

  "Nelson, Nelson," I said wearily, "you're not getting how this works. Like my friend said, we don't want to hurt you. But, we will if we need to. You don't get to ask questions unless it's to clarify how to help us. Get it?"

  "W-well, if I knew why you needed in, maybe I could figure out how best to do it," said Nelson.

  "Appreciated, but unnecessary, Nelson, we just need in the server," I said. "What's your login name? I bet you have full admin access." I sat down at a machine. A wiggle of the mouse produced a login screen.

  "I can't let you login as me!" said Nelson.

  "You also can't let me punch you, but you've been done a terrible job with that," I said.

  Mikkel looked at me and raised his eyebrows. Okay, maybe I was a little too into harassi
ng this guy. I admit I was more Dick Cop than Bad Cop.

  "C'mon," I said, and then affected my own work voice. "Hello, I'm your Help Desk Agent Szandor, please provide me your login credentials so I can better assist you."

  "M-my login is nbradley," stuttered Nelson.

  "Way ahead of your on that," I said. I had already typed that, expecting the typical first name last name. But it was worth asking to make sure his login wasn't bigdickedsephirothxXxssj13 or something. "And the password?"

  "Ummm..." said Nelson. "Well, remember that we need to have very secure passwords, things that can't be brute force hacked, so we have to utilize certain rules when we create a password. That can make the passwords... a little strange."

  "Nelson, what's the damn password?"

  He had to spell it out for me. Cr@ckP1p3.

  "Crackpipe?" said Mikkel.

  "It works!" I said after I entered it, now logged into the system.

  "Why crackpipe?" said Mikkel.

  "Now to plug in this USB drive," I said.

  "What? You can't put something insecure on the network! It's dangerous!" said Nelson, leaping to his feet and coming over to my desk.

  As soon as he was around the corner, there was a thump and Nelson hit the floor. Mikkel had chopped Nelson's neck from behind with the edge of his hand, knocking Nelson out.

  "We were gonna need to do that at some point," said Mikkel.

  I nodded. Using my limited computer knowledge gleaned from my job and Paulie's instructions, I was copying the worm from the USB drive onto one of the servers. For one minute I felt like a badass movie hacker rather than a monkey with a flash drive, which is what I was.

  Once copied, I executed the worm. I saw lots of lines of text fly by in the window, then stop. I stared at the screen for another minute or so to see if it would do anything else.

  "Is it done?" asked Mikkel, having dragged Nelson's limp body into the corner where it couldn't be seen from a quick look through the door.

  "I don't know," I said. "It's stopped doing anything, at least." I unplugged the flash drive. I didn't want that evidence hanging around in the server room. The worm had been copied to the servers, so if it had more to execute, it should be able to do it from there.

  "I guess it's time to go," I said. "I guess we'll find out for ourselves if this has failed when all the security personnel leap on us at once."

  "Always the eternal optimist," said Mikkel.

  Invaders

  The biomedical research center of the Clark Building was its own floor. It was accessible only by two large sets of doors on either end of it. The reason for this was simple: to lock it down in case of emergency. And that wouldn't be a call-the-cops sort of emergency. It would be something like, "Holy crap, our highly virulent strain of the KILL EVERYONE virus has escaped the lab!" or "Look, all our monsters have escaped from their cells and want to KILL EVERYONE!" There was supposedly so much going on at the Minerva labs that there were multiple ways for everyone to die. The lockdown protocol was as much for virus and germ containment as it was for monster containment.

  As a citizen of New Avalon, I appreciated the lockdown floor plan: the last thing we needed was some sort of outbreak in a building right in the heart of Midtown. As one of a pair of brothers currently trying to infiltrate the building to rescue a kidnap victim, the floor plan was a major headache. The two entrances had security. On one end there was a desk with a security guard and a receptionist. From the docs Paulie reviewed, these were manned at all times. That entrance was near the main elevator for the entire building so all the corporate suits, scientists, doctors, etc were expected to come through that way. This was not where we intended to enter the area. The other entrance was not guarded, but had a security card scanner. This was the end near the underground loading dock, the freight elevator that went down to the biohazard barrel area, and where the commandos would bring in the recently captured specimens. Unsurprisingly, this door opened right into the creature holding area. To get to where they were holding Jessica in quarantine, we would need to walk through all the holding cells, past the labs and med bays, to near the corporate door. We weren't exactly thrilled to be taking the long way around.

  We climbed up the stairs to the biomedical center, floor B3. We were taking the stairs everywhere in the Clark Building. Not just for cardio - we liked the idea of being able to run away. Elevators seemed too claustrophobic. We didn't want someone to slam down the Emergency Lockdown button and leave us trapped in an elevator.

  The entry area next to the stairs appeared empty when we opened the stairwell door. We took a moment to confirm how empty. The freight elevator was not in use. We looked out the loading dock into the underground garage and while we saw black SUVs, there was no activity. Either the night shift was out or no op was planned at the time.

  We returned to the lockdown entry. The doors were massive since they were for handling freight and live cargo. They were stainless steel, had no handles, and had only a badge scanner. Cameras were set into various parts of the room. I hoped that whatever worm Ezra had us upload was working... otherwise someone had been watching us wander through their building. I guessed that since nobody had come running to tackle us yet that we hadn't been noticed.

  We swiped the card, fairly confident that Smilin' Rick Molina would have access to this door. He was clearly in the Monster Retrieval Squad[43], so he would need to move creatures through these doors. A moment after we swiped the card, there was a beep. Then the doors opened smoothly, rather like elevator doors.

  There was a brief staging area, which was the dirtiest part of the medcenter. It was a wide open area with tools on the walls such as aprons, stun guns, leashes, cuffs, masks, bits, bridle, straightjackets, sedatives, and more. It could have been a serial killer's heaven if it didn't look so damn clinical and corporate. The center of the wide area had a linoleum floor that was heavily nicked and gouged. I was pretty sure that this is where they separated out the creatures and wrestled them to the ground if they weren't completely submissive.

  But once past that, the rest of the medical center was a clean white. We didn't expect the biomedical center to be so white. You know how you see movie hospitals and movie space hospitals and they're like gleaming white? Like so white that you know as soon as you set foot in them you're going to track dirt you didn't even know you had on your shoes through all their halls? It was like that. Mikkel said the overhead lights were set on THX1138. Everything was so overly bright we had to squint until our eyes got used to it. The white walls were marred only by vents and the Minerva Technics logo (Big M, little T).

  Past the staging area started the holding cells. I say cells, but there were no bars. These were more like zoo enclosures. On either side of the main corridor were clear windows, probably made of some high grade plastic. There were no visible air holes, probably having their own climate control or something similar. In these rooms the Minerva Technics commandos had placed all their monsters.

  They weren't mixed, so there was no zombie-on-Spider fighting, nor did we have to worry about some crossbred ghoul-Spider super mutants. But for the most part, different types of monsters had a general population and then a few isolated into individual cells. The main corridor had its windows looking into the general populations cells. First were zombie pens. I wasn't surprised to see them there. Based on how slow they were and how minor the infection risk is, they were perfect for testing. These were docile. With the doors were closed, they just kind of stood there and swayed. Occasionally one would tumble forward and slam against the plexiglass.

  The next section was Spiders. I saw one large area where they had allowed them to make an actual hive. It was fused with the wall and stretched to the top of the cell. The walls were nearly covered with Spiders. Who were these madmen who wanted a working hive of creatures in their lab? Hell, in their corporate offices? Holy fuck, in center of a major city?

  Any respect I had for Ezra or any of the Minerva research and security divisions wa
s slowly disappearing. I didn't give a damn what scientific advancements they were gaining. They had a working hive of an infestation creature in a poorly secured office building. You may say, "Look, Szandor, they have all this security and lockdown protocols. It's safe!"

  And I say to you, look at me. I'm some punk kid standing in the middle of their holding cells without security even alerted. Clearly this place was not secure enough.

  In the next section were the ghouls. The white cells had been smeared with blood and filth. The cells seemed very full, possibly from that harvesting mission we saw in the tunnels. The ghouls inside were lounging but not harmless. These ghouls had a relaxed alertness that reminded me of the one time I was on a field trip to the Houghton Zoo. The lions had that expression. There was nothing for them to hunt now, but they were ready for prey and waited for their moment to strike. They'd kill you if you gave them the chance.

  The last section had just a single occupied cell. It was one of the general population sized cells but it had only one monster in it. I looked through the glass and saw just a man sitting on a folding chair in the center of the room. He was wearing only a hospital gown and his palms rested on his knees. The man had light brown hair, a dimpled jaw, and his nose had been broken at least once, giving it a strange curve. A closer look revealed torn and broken restraints in a haphazard pile at his feet.

  He would have seemed harmless to anyone else. To anyone uninformed, they'd be wondering how a poor man got accidentally locked in a place full of monsters. They'd demand his release, maybe make the foolish mistake of entering the cell. I wasn't so foolish. I knew all the signs. This was my most hated of enemies. This man was a revenant.

  Based on the previous cells, I was sure that this plastic glass qualified as one-way, meaning that from the inside it would appear tinted, blank, or mirrored. But as we looked at the revenant, his eyes flickered from sightless staring to looking right at us. It was so purposeful that it wasn't a coincidence. He saw us. And while his expression did not change, his eyes bored into us. This was by far the most dangerous single creature in the whole place.