There was a lot of factors at play but she didn’t think she had a good grasp on a solid theory. She had just another clue. She left the dead boy and headed for the back door. She passed a small window that had been slid partially open. The sound of a conversation made her duck instantly. The window was about head height and only small. It would barely accommodate her if she tried to use it.
She froze, the conversation was nothing more than a mumble against the sound of the sea breeze but it didn’t seem to have been interrupted. She cautiously rose to her feet and peered into the window. She couldn’t see who was talking, the room was too full of machinery and computers. It was her first sign of an actual survivor and she was suddenly made to question the appropriate course of action. Was this survivor friendly, or was it one of the intruding forces? With the dead boy nearby, she wasn’t entirely convinced she would find the voices belonging to a friendly security team. Exercising caution and investigating from a distance seemed the perfect response to this situation. She crept down from the window and headed towards the small metal door. It too proved to be locked, with a key, and she had to backtrack to the window. She glanced once more before she hoisted herself up to the sill. The room smelt of smouldering rubber and steel she noticed as she slid the window open. It, thankfully, opened with minimal protest. The conversation was happening elsewhere in the building, not in this room. She dropped down and took the deliberate effort to re-button her pistols into their holsters. She was going to have to snake her way through this window and it would be rather embarrassing to have her pistols spill out. It would make a noisy entrance for sure if they freefell and clattered to the floor. She took a jump at the window and fed herself into its small opening, she then proceeded to spill slowly into the room and land on her hands. Fiona’s yoga-instructor-cum-lover would’ve been proud of the manoeuvre as Sky eased from the handstand over onto her feet. Even Sky was pleasantly surprised at her flexibility. To think less than twelve hours ago she’d been asleep in a stasis tank and now she was performing Olympic standard gymnastics…
She glanced back to the window, impressed even more with how easily she’d slipped through such a small opening.
“…Why do I always get the shit jobs?” it was a male voice and it was approaching. She dropped and scuttled behind the nearest terminal. “I mean, everybody else gets to sit in the main labs, but me and you - oh no! Lets go guard the satellite dish, go scope out the other lab, just always the little shit…”
“Oh c’mon, I’d rather be out here than stuck in there with boss and that weird woman…” a second male voice answered him. His voice was deeper and sounded a little older than the first. The pair of them had a slight Spanish twang to their voices.
“Really? Out here with those zombies…?!”
“They’re not zombies…”
“What? Then what the fuck would you call them…?!” Was the exasperated reply.
“I dunno…”
“They’re fucking zombies. It’s like some sci-fi horror shit man! Bringing it aboard the island and setting it off… Jesus, did you see them…” the first man came to rest on the other side of the terminal Sky was hiding behind. “Did you see the way they just went… wild, feral… I mean fuck man! I didn’t sign up for this shit…”
“You wanna be careful saying shit like that,”
“Why?”
“Cos Boss don’t like people to talk like that,” Sky was beginning to believe the second male, the one with the deeper voice, was a little dimmer than his mate. It was something about the way he spoke.
“I don’t give a fuck…”
“You should. You don’t want to be a ‘loose end’…”
The first man sighed. “Fuck…”
“It’ll be okay. We only need to wait till the back-up arrives, then the woman gets what she wants and we can get off this island and get paid…”
“And when will the back-up arrive? It could be hours yet! All the time we’re stuck here with those fucking zombies, hanging around with our thumbs up our asses!”
“You need to chill man…”
“Chill? How the fuck can you chill when you watch a little girl get torn to pieces by people we infected with some virus!”
The other man didn’t have an answer.
“It could happen to us…”
“We’re protected you know that…”
“What, with some vaccine that woman gave us? I don’t know if I can trust her! And sure we may be protected from becoming one of them but that doesn’t stop us from becoming lunch for one of them…”
“Jesus! Joey, you need to just chill the fuck out…”
Joey didn’t respond.
After a significant pause, “I’m sorry dude, I just think I’m going stir-crazy… I mean, we’re completely isolated here. And there’s some really fucked up shit going off here in this hell-hole… People fucking eating people…”
“It’s okay,” the other guy offered indifferently. “It’ll be all good when we get paid…”
Joey sighed.
“Come on, we need to head to the B-Lab… There’s nobody here, this place is secure…”
“Do we have to? What if someone tries to come back here…?” Somebody sounded very reluctant to be heading outside again.
“I doubt they will, they’re probably hiding…”
“Fine…” Joey answered reluctantly.
“Come on, our orders were to check on this place and then go find what happened to Ricardo and Bo,”
“Same thing happened to them as it did Jeremiah, they got got…” Joey answered disenfranchised.
“We don’t know that. We last saw Jeremiah heading into the sewers… He might‘ve survived,”
“Unlikely…”
“Have faith brother,”
“Stormer how do you stay so calm?” Joey sighed.
“There ain’t much point losing your cool… Those monsters don’t care, they’ll tear you apart first chance they get. Might as well just be cool and then everything will be cool…”
There was an unidentifiable set of scraping sounds and then the pair of men began to head out towards the front door. She dared a glance and spied two men, dressed in private military attire, heading out. They swiped their way in and out with a key card.
She noticed they were armed with substantial machine guns, MP7’s to be precise.
When the door closed shut behind them, she dared to stand up.
What an enlightening conversation…
She now understood that the intruders had come aboard the Island and released the virus into the population themselves. All under the direct order of a woman. Sky was looking forward to meeting her, she had a lot of questions.
But who was the back-up they were waiting for? Sky was inclined to think that they were expecting a second wave of their own forces, but it didn’t sit right. Why would they need back up? They weren’t stranded here, they had arrived by boat and they could leave just the same way. They had perfectly acceptable means of getting off the island when their business concluded, so why did they need a back-up? Were they planning on killing everybody and getting rid of the evidence? But why bother infecting them at all, why not just eliminate them?
Again a load of questions and so little in the way of answers. She slowly rose to her feet.
She glanced around the terminals and saw lots of blinking screens and twinkling lights. The machines looked a little scrambled but it made no sense to her, nor would she know how to pinpoint the root of the problem. She headed into the next room, finding a wide staircase that led up to the second floor dominating another room crammed with computers and machinery. This second room was lined with a great number of machines, they were all blinking and disrupted. This wasn’t an EMP attack, that would’ve fried the whole building.
So how had they been-?
Footsteps overhead took Sky by surprise, she stopped and listened. The unmistakable sound of feet upon flooring was heading towards the top of the stairs. She de
cided to quickly take cover under them. She hadn’t expected there to be another presence in the building so she was quietly surprised, she ducked low and concealed herself out of sight. She had a little gap between two machines that afforded her a small view through the stairs. She spied a pair of legs descend and reveal themselves to be a woman. A woman dressed in the island’s security outfit; a black and maroon jacket, black trousers, a stiff maroon blouse and a black bullet-proof vest. She was also attired in sensible black boots and had seemingly accessorised her look with a silver bracelet. She was tall, lean and appeared well trained. She descended efficiently, her gun aimed before her just like she had been trained to do. Her long brown hair was raked into a tight ponytail at the back of her neck. She swept the room quickly, not seeing a well hidden Sky. Satisfied she was alone she tried the main door. It didn’t yield and didn’t so much as rattle in its hinges as she pulled. Blocked she had no choice and entered the other room, a few moments later and Sky thought she heard a dull thud. She crept up onto her feet and with her own pistol cocked, she slowly followed after the woman. She wasn’t in the room when Sky stepped inside. She must’ve escaped via the window. Judging by the thud she didn’t do it as gracefully as Sky had.
Sky turned her attention back to the stairs. It was interesting that the woman had been spying on the mercenaries herself. What was she doing here?
There was only one way to try and find out, she headed up. The second floor was split in two halves. One half was a small living suite, for the workers who’s role was to sleep here and maintain the satellite all hours, both waking and not. Three dead men, obviously workers, were piled in the corner of the lounge area. They’d been systematically executed and then discarded. A TV screen in the lounge displayed an error screen. She retreated from the suite and headed towards the master consoles. Nothing looked out of sort, bar the flickering screens of course, until Sky noticed a small screw on the wiry blue carpet floor. Where had that come from? She dropped and followed the base of the console. She found a panel that was missing a screw. It might’ve been nothing but it suddenly struck her as very odd. Curiosity whetted she considered how she might open it. She didn’t have a screwdriver to hand, she considered the possibility of rooting through the living quarters for one but that might take too long. She tapped the metal sheet. It didn’t seem particularly thick…
She decided that it would probably be far easier to just brute force this. She began to punch the panel near the unscrewed corner, angling her strikes so the metal began to bend up and off the corner. When she had finally manipulated enough, she prised the edge of the cover with her fingers and tore it back. It took three attempts before she’d managed to wrench majority of the panel off and even dislodged another screw. She dug her hand in and immediately found a suspicious black box. She took a grasp of it and gave it a gentle tug. It resisted lightly before relinquishing grip. It looked like a black square bug. She turned it over and saw it had special feet that pegged onto the wires. She guessed when it was attached, it somehow worked as a bridge for the connections while going under the systems notice too. She turned it back over. Was this the blocker? This simple little thing…?
She’d never seen anything like it.
She turned her attention to the main console. It was displaying a new image.
“ADJUSTING. PLEASE WAIT.” it read.
No flickering screen. Was it fixed?
She glanced back to the black device in her hand. Something the size of her hand had brought down an entire island’s communications? She’d expected something much grander…
She felt a little under whelmed. It wasn’t the first time in her life she’d been under whelmed by the size of things…
She wondered what to do with it, this strange little device. Would Eve want her to bring it in? She could picture the redheaded girl enjoying picking apart the machine…
When communications restored she’d be able to ask her.
A new message appeared onscreen.
“Reconfiguring satellite. Please wait. ETA: 3hrs 41minutes.”
“Oh…” she remarked in surprise. That long?
She hesitated, wondering if perhaps the system would change its mind and offer a much speedier estimate. It counted down a minute and didn’t adjust itself any more than that.
“Shit…” She sighed. Perhaps she’d been expecting too much… She pressed the button on her earpiece and still no connection. Of course.
So now she would have to wait till the satellite system reconnected. She however wasn’t going to hang about for the next 3 hours. She placed the mysterious device down on the nearest table and considered her options. Option one, follow the intruders to the B-Lab and learn more about them. Option two, head for the main-lab and unearth what had happened to the Island and possibly find the woman who had seemingly masterminded the entire affair. Option three, find the woman and potential other survivors.
Option two was the one she decided on after a small deliberation. She hesitated at the top of the stairs. An idea had suddenly occurred to her, the Rain employees in the other room would surely have a key card for the door to this building. Spare her the task of climbing out of the window again. She went to the pile of dead bodies and systematically began checking their pockets. Once upon a time she would’ve been disturbed by the dead, but the days in the army had accustomed her to death and to the dead themselves. Hadn’t she dealt enough death herself to no longer be affected by it? It would be like a doctor being afraid of medicine. Death was something she practiced. It was a rather dark and sobering reflection. As she found a key card in a jean pocket, she reflected on how she felt a certain kinship with the dead. For wasn’t she dead herself? Fiona Kirkman was legally dead and Sky was nothing more than a reflection of the woman. Legally she was nothing more than a dead woman, someone who had long expired…
Perhaps she was more of a zombie than the creatures roaming outside…? It was a rather curious thought and suddenly Sky didn’t know what to think. It swiftly silenced her mind. In need of distraction she left the building using her new key card and headed for the main-lab.
------------------------------------------------
Sky had found her way to the main-lab blocked by an obstacle she wasn’t quite sure how to tackle. There was a fifty strong collection of the ‘zombies’ hovering around the entrance, idling about without purpose. There was a broad mix of backgrounds, some of them were dressed in white lab coats, others in civilian clothing. There was a few young children too.
She was stood at the corner watching them, they seemed to jerk and twitch occasionally like short bursts of electricity bolted through their bodies periodically. Was the infection affecting their neurological systems and that’s why they twitched? Something not to dissimilar from the shaking of Parkinsons…?
How was she going to manage to navigate around these? It was quite the impasse…
She decided that perhaps she’d need a completely alternative route. However, without Eve and her expertise, that would be very difficult. She didn’t know of any other way into the main laboratory… Would they even have a secondary entrance into the lab?
She crept away from the street corner she’d been watching from and decided to head towards the small shopping complex, perhaps she’d find some inspiration there? Even if it was just a means of increasing her firepower. She wasn’t going to be bolster her armoury she knew that much but something as simple as a gas tank would be a mighty handy means of blowing her way in. But would a little self contained island like this stock them?
She was crossing the street towards the small complex when her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the mysterious woman from earlier sneaking out of a nearby administration building. Sky, unnoticed by the woman, ducked low and hid alongside a small hedge. She watched curiously as the woman hoisted a small backpack over one shoulder, it seemed heavy and laden. She glanced both ways down the street before she stepped off the pavement, either for potential danger or because it was
simply habitual. She then hurried to a manhole cover in the middle of the road, she then swiftly prised it open with a tool Sky hadn’t noticed she’d been carrying. A last glance around her, before she disappeared into the sewer system. The manhole cover slid shut, the noise travelling a substantial distance down the empty street.
Suddenly Sky knew where the survivor was based, in the sewers. A rather clever idea, Sky was rather impressed. She slowly stood back up. Perhaps option three would serve her better right now? It wasn’t particularly how she liked to work, but maybe a little help might be just the ticket to getting into the main-lab…? She glanced at the shopping complex up ahead, then decided that scoping out this survivor would be her new primary focus.
If nothing else, Sky might learn what the woman was up to on the Island sneaking about like that…
She followed, using her own strength to lift the manhole cover instead of the tool that the woman required. After a few moments, Sky was stood in the dark dampness of the sewer. She had slid the cover closed behind her, and been immediately encased in a muggy blackness. She found her little handheld torch on her belt, turned it on and then clipped it to her brace.
She’d expected it to be dirtier than it was, and the smell wasn’t as abhorrent as Sky would’ve expected from a sewer either. But perhaps the 283 residents didn’t create that much waste? But just because this sewerage system didn’t smell too bad didn’t mean she was in any rush to sample any others.
She glanced around and saw it was something of a labyrinth of tunnels. Dark tight tunnels, like she was exploring the veins of the monstrous island. She glanced down and saw her first trail, a wet footprint. A small puddle had been stood in by the woman and she’d began leaving footprints.
The Rain In The Sky Page 4