Okay, so he was pissed at me.
Too bad.
This wasn’t all about his turtle, after all. It was about doing what was best to get the mission completed as quickly and safely as possible. Obviously, I was going to do my best to save Agnes as well. No, she wasn’t my favorite shelled creature in the world, but she’d proven herself useful, and I knew how much she meant to my partner. The ultimate goal was to save our lead technician, though. He had the knowledge and ability to help combat Keller on the tech side of things. There were no doubt many others living in the Netherworld who could fight the mage in the realm of the digital, but Pecker was the only one we trusted.
“Don’t worry, Reap,” I said in a direct connection, fighting not to roll my eyes, “we’ll get her.”
And with that, Kix and I moved out into the hallway like a couple of cats on the prowl.
Chapter 4
The area was conspicuously clear. We weren’t exactly on the busier side of the floor, which was where Pecker worked, but I would have expected at least a couple of goons to be down here.
Was this yet another tick in the column of bad-guy-megalomaniac-is-overly-confident-and-therefore-doesn’t-cover-his-ass-properly?
Probably.
Well, that was his problem. Just because Keller wasn’t wise enough to watch his back, that didn’t mean I was going to turn a blind eye toward mine.
“Keep your head on a swivel, Kix,” I said in a direct connection. “We don’t want anyone sneaking up on us.”
He didn’t reply, but I noted that his tats darkened a fair bit. He was getting damn near to looking like a short Avatar character at this point. Minus the big eyes, anyway.
We reached the end of the corridor and I heard a couple of voices.
I held up my hand to stop Kix and then I slid down on my belly and sneaked a peek around the corner.
There were two men I hadn’t seen in the precinct before.
That alone wouldn’t have meant much considering all the new recruits we’d had as of late, but these guys were wearing dark brown outfits. If I’d put on my design hat—or if I’d just thought a bit like Reaper, the PPD’s designer extraordinaire—I’d say the color of those suits was either mocha or umber. Personally, I’d have gone with onyx or obsidian, but I was clearly not up on the latest trends in evil fashion.
They both were carrying automatic weapons, and they looked to be ready to fire them at the first sign of trouble.
I couldn’t allow that.
Somehow we had to disable or kill these two before they could make a noise. Any sound would notify other baddies on this floor that trouble was brewing.
Can you say ‘shit storm’?
I inched back and then got up.
“Two of them,” I said to Kix while scanning the area for anything that may help us in our attack. “Automatic weapons.”
“Noisy.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s not like our guns have silencers on them, Piper.”
I repeated myself. “Exactly.”
Kix nodded and began looking around as well. If I was being honest, I’d have to say he was probably more suited for coming up with sneakier options than I was. To be fair, though, Kix wasn’t immortal. He had more riding on the line than I did.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me into one of the rooms on the side.
As soon as the door was shut, he pulled out his datapad and started typing away.
“What are you looking for?” I whispered, seeing no point on using the connector while in here.
“Pecker has a lot of gadgets and stuff down on this level,” Kix answered. “Most of it is in his main office, but he stores various items in this room as well. Things that are either old or that he never got working.” He flipped around the pad. “But he’s created an inventory of everything, including what each piece does and how they’re used. Well, either that or he marks it as useless.”
That was Pecker for you. He was odd, constantly hitting on me, and full of ideas that would humble Einstein.
I started looking around the room we were in. It was basically just a bunch of boxes. There were no doubt many items in those boxes, but I wasn’t about to start digging around. With my luck, I’d open something that contained a massive alarm.
“This is interesting,” Kix said, moving over to a set of containers near the back of the small room. “It says they’ve not been tested, but…”
He set down the datapad and took a box from the lowest shelf.
It was covered in dust.
Kix blew on it and then waved his hand to clear the air, coughing a few times in the process.
“If you could try to be a little louder,” I chastised him, “that’d be swell.”
“Sorry.”
He gingerly set the box down on a small table and took the top off it.
Inside were a bunch of smaller boxes.
“Impressive,” I said, doing my best to sound sincere. “Tiny boxes. Just what we need. If we can find some wrapping paper, we may be able to convince the bad guys that they’re getting gifts. That’ll put them off their guard for sure.”
Kix squinted at me.
“It’s what’s inside those boxes that matters, Piper.”
I grunted and gave him a look. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he replied at length, clearly not catching my sarcasm.
He snagged one of the smaller boxes and opened it.
It was empty.
“Perfect,” Kix whispered in a voice laced with awe.
I rubbed my eyes and looked in the box again.
Still looked empty to me.
…Then I noticed something.
There was the slightest shimmer. Kind of like the effect of the stealth that the alien in Predator had out in the jungle.
“Okay,” I said, catching up with the program, “what the fuck am I looking at?”
“Empiric,” Kix said almost reverently. “Pecker created a nearly invisible empiric.”
I leaned in closer.
“Well, son of a bitch.”
Chapter 5
I held the empiric carefully, knowing how deadly the things could be. No, it wouldn’t kill me, but it’d still hurt a lot and Kix would be a goner.
The disc-like weapon barely blocked the view of my fingers at all as I looked down through it.
“These things shouldn’t be stuffed in a box,” I gushed, “they should be in the field.”
“Except that there are a few problems with them,” Kix piped up, pointing down at his datapad. “First off, they’re easy to misplace.”
“Ah, yeah,” I acknowledged. “I could see that.”
“Secondly, they’re not all that user-friendly.”
I looked up at him. “What’s that mean?”
“That they’re not simple to use.”
“I know what ‘user-friendly’ means, Kix,” I sighed. “I’m asking why they’re not user-friendly?”
“Poor design, I guess,” he answered with a shrug.
At that moment, I wanted to activate the empiric, stuff it down the front of his pants, and wait for the fun to begin.
I held myself in check.
“Kix,” I said in a controlled voice, “I’m asking you what it is about this empiric that made Pecker note it as not being easy to use?”
“Oh, right,” he said, clearing his throat. “Sorry. Uh…in order to make sure that a person didn’t just inadvertently activate it, Pecker made the process more difficult than usual. I guess he did that in case someone found a misplaced one, but I’m not sure.”
That meant you couldn’t just spin the bottom half in the opposite direction of the top half and fling it at your intended victim.
I supposed that was a sensible move. Trying to explain away how an entire city block got wiped out due to an unseen force wouldn’t have been fun, especially since all eyes would definitely be looking at the PPD. We had the coolest stuff, after all.
“So how do you activate it?”
“Before you’re able to spin the top and bottom,” he said as his finger scanned the screen, “you have to tap and rub the device in a certain sequence.”
“Tap it?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “You know, like when you’re playing the drums on your steering wheel as you’re driving down—”
“Kix,” I interrupted him, “I know what the fuck tapping means! Just tell me the sequence.”
He grimaced, clearly realizing that he was getting on my last nerve.
“Uh…” He swallowed and then started scanning the screen again. “Okay, okay, here it is.” He cleared his throat. “So you tap it once in the center on one side, then you run your finger around the outside in a counterclockwise motion. Then you tap it twice on the other side, and run your finger around the edge in a clockwise motion. Three more taps on the first side you tapped and you should feel a tingling sensation.” He ran his eyes over the information for a few moments. “That’s it. After you feel the tingling, you should be able to open it, which will make it active.”
“Meaning it’ll have five seconds before blowing up?”
“Three seconds, actually,” Kix corrected me. Then, he held up a finger. “Wait, the number of taps you do on the last step determines the number of seconds it’ll count before exploding.”
“That’s handy,” I stated. “Actually, that would be a great feature to have on normal empirics.”
“Yeah.”
My brain raced over all the instances in the past that I could have used that little feature. Another great feature would be a proximity trigger. The problem there though was that it could be set off if an innocent walked by. Then again, the counter would go off regardless of whether innocents were in the area or not.
“Okay,” I said, realizing that the fifteen minutes I’d told Reaper and Brazen to wait was quickly dwindling away. “So other than the activation sequence and the fact that this thing is nearly invisible, is there anything else different about it?”
“A few things, actually,” Kix said with a slow nod. “It won’t flash on exploding, it won’t make a sound, its blast radius is limited, and it’ll completely obliterate anything within that area.”
I tilted my head and squinted.
“Explain ‘obliterate,’” I said, and then quickly held up my hand as he opened his mouth. “I’m not talking about the definition of the word, Kix. I’m talking about what specifically it means in relation to how this empiric works.”
“Ah, right,” he said. “Well, according to this document, it’ll just wipe the person out completely. There’ll be no trace of them at all.”
“Not even ash or dust?”
He shook his head soberly.
So this thing could kill me and Reaper. If we got injured, that’d be one thing, but if we were completely wiped out…well, that’d be kind of a permanent situation.
“Damn,” I hissed. “I sure am glad Pecker is on our side.”
Kix’s nod was almost imperceptible.
“All right,” I declared. “You’re going to be responsible for activating these things and I’ll take care of sliding them out.”
“Things?” he croaked. “You mean you want me to bring more than one?”
“Uh, yeah,” I affirmed with a chiding tone. “We may not just be facing two guards, you know?”
“I know that, Piper,” he argued, “but we’re also not going to want to use them in the vicinity of Pecker and Agnes, right?”
Damn.
He was right.
Still, if they had as small a blast radius as those documents claimed, we’d be able to carefully calculate placements.
“Just bring three of them,” I commanded as I handed him the one I was holding. “I promise we’ll be careful.”
Chapter 6
I wanted to look around for more stuff, but time was not on our side, so I dragged Kix out the door and told him to hook me up with one of the empirics.
“Set it for ten seconds.”
“Ten seconds?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“Too short?”
“Was thinking it was too long, actually,” he replied.
“I’ll take my chances.”
He went through the process of taps, swirlies, and all that before handing it over to me. It was still tingling slightly in my hand as I stepped to the other wall, angling myself just enough to wing the empiric down the hall without being seen.
I’d thought for certain it’d at least make a noise as I flung it, but I heard nothing at all.
“Did you throw it?” Kix asked.
“I sure fucking hope so,” I said, scooting away from the area, just in case. “If not, it’s—”
I hadn’t even finished my sentence before hearing someone say, “Harry? Where’d you go?”
I looked at Kix with wide eyes.
He returned my impressed stare.
“I guess that means it worked,” I said.
“Poor Harry.”
I furrowed my brow at Kix.
“Come on, Harry,” the guard called out. “You promised you weren’t going to screw around this time. The boss is already pissed about the last mission he sent us on, and that was your fault. I’m not letting you do this to me again.”
The sound of footsteps could be heard.
“Harry,” the guard called out again. “That’s it. I’m going upstairs to tell the boss. I’m not taking the punishment for you again.”
And with that, the sound of clomping boots faded away.
“Perfect,” I said, stepping over to the corner to peer around, just in case. “The coast is clear. Let’s go.”
I padded down the hallway, sticking close to the walls. We got to the door where the guards had been standing and I took a peek inside.
Pecker was on the far side of the room with his back against the wall and his hands up. Since he was relatively short, even for a goblin, it was tough to see anything other than his hands. But since they were facing outward, I knew he was facing me.
The question I had was why he didn’t have his connector on.
“I see him,” I told Kix, who was busily reading his datapad again. “There’s only one gunman in there, and he’s standing between us and Pecker.”
“So just plug him in the back and be done with it,” Kix suggested, taking a harder stance than usual.
He was clearly very interested in what he was reading.
“Actually,” I replied, after some thought, “I think we need to talk with this guy.”
Kix stopped reading and gave me an incredulous look.
“What?”
“Use your connector, dipshit,” I scolded. “Sneaking in is one thing, announcing our entrance is quite another!”
“Sorry,” he said, turning his eyes back to the datapad. “Why would you want to talk to the guy? He’ll just signal the others that we’re here, right?”
There was a strong chance that if we snuck up on this dude, we’d end up getting ratted out. He’d certainly be using his connector, or whatever equivalent he may have had, to inform Keller that agents had arrived. But we only needed a couple of minutes with him in order to get things done. Besides, the guard who was currently off telling on his pal Harry was undoubtedly going to bring some attention back down here.
“Don’t move,” said a stern voice from behind us, driving a wedge in my plan.
“Shit,” I said, giving my junior officer a look out of the corner of my eye. “Way to keep your head on a swivel there, Kix.”
Kix’s head fell forward and he groaned.
“Hands up,” the guard said, motioning at us with his gun. “Get in the room.”
With a sigh that was more intended to show my displeasure with Kix than with the situation, I pushed into the room.
“Piper?” Pecker said while looking past the woman who had her gun trained on him. “What are you doing here?”
“Ask Kix,” I said with a half nod.
Chapter 7
&nbs
p; The one guard took our guns while the other one kept her gun trained on us. I could only hope that Kix would keep the empirics safe. They had liberated his datapad, though, so all it would take is one look and they’d know about them.
Of course, his datapad was currently off, meaning that they’d only get in if they made him use his biometrics to open it.
I decided the best course of action would be to distract them before that thought came to mind.
“I’m not putting my hands up,” I stated, crossing my arms.
“Never asked you to,” the female guard replied. Then, she motioned toward Pecker. “Never asked him to, either.”
I frowned at Pecker.
“What?” he said with a sheepish grin. “A hot chick pointed a gun at me. May as well ride the fantasy while it’s there.”
“Ew,” both the guard and I said in unison as Pecker adjusted the backpack he was wearing.
That was a new piece to his normal ensemble. It told me that he’d been caught as he was planning to escape.
“Does your connector work in here, Pecker?” I asked, keeping my sour look so the guard wouldn’t suspect anything.
“Yep.”
“Why didn’t you contact us, then?”
“Security procedures, Piper,” he replied, his eyes devouring the guard. “As soon as I heard gunfire, I checked the cameras and saw we were being invaded. So, I entered in the lockdown protocols.”
“And what exactly does that mean?”
“All the computers in here send a burst backup to my personal station at home, where it’s encrypted and sealed, the doors on this level all close and fuse, and the connectors are blocked from communication in and out of this room.”
“We were able to get through the doors just fine,” I noted, fighting to keep from furrowing my brow. “Clearly, these guards were able to as well.”
“Yep,” Pecker replied. “Something’s obviously busted.”
That was the understatement of the year.
I could see the use in having the entirety of the bottom floor go on lockdown. It wouldn’t stop an invading force from getting into any of the rooms, but it’d certainly slow them down. But just like a fire alarm system, things like this should be tested.
Major Feeding: A Piper & Payne Supernatural Thriller (Netherworld Paranormal Police Department Book 4) Page 2